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They are prisoner, it doesn't mean they can't be dancers or whoever they want to be

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They are prisoner, it doesn't mean they can't be dancers or whoever they want to be

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Past mistakes don't define their present and future beings.

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"People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," 

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"People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," 

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"sometimes the dynamics at work and home ask us to be different people. The violent gangster at work may be the kind father at home"

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"sometimes the dynamics at work and home ask us to be different people. The violent gangster at work may be the kind father at home"

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How could we be better with getting rid of our bias

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How could we be better with getting rid of our bias

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Dynamic personalities is a chance to perceive a person in a different way

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Dynamic personalities is a chance to perceive a person in a different way

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Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Invisibilia podcast and program, which is broadcast on participating public radio stations. This story contains language that some may find offensive.
This is the story of a prisoner who committed a horrible crime and says he's no longer the same person who did it. It's also the story of why it's so hard for us to believe him.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Harvard University was assigned to teach a class on personality. Though Walter Mischel was excited to prove himself as a teacher, there was one small problem: He didn't happen to know very much about personality.

"So, realizing I had to teach this stuff, I decided to look at the literature," says Mischel, who now works at Columbia University. "And I found myself enormously puzzled."

Mischel, like pretty much every other psychologist at the time, had some basic assumptions about personality. The first was that people had different personalities, and that those personalities could be defined by certain traits, such as extroversion, conscientiousness, sociability.

At the time, personality researchers liked to argue about which traits were most important. But they never argued about the underlying premise of their field - that whatever traits you had were stable throughout your life and consistent across different situations.

"For example, a friendly person is someone who should be friendly over time," Mischel says. "So if he's friendly at 20, he should be friendly at 25. And if he's friendly, he should be friendly across most situations in which friendliness is a reasonable and accepted possible way of being."

Thus an honest person would behave like an honest person no matter where they went or how much time passed, and a criminal would remain a criminal.

But when Walter Mischel sat down to do his literature review, he didn't find much support for the idea that personality is stable. "I expected to find that the assumptions would be justified," he says, "and then I started reading study after study that found that actually the data didn't support it."

One enormous study on honesty in children was done way back in 1928. The researchers, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, had put thousands of children in different settings where they had the opportunity to cheat or steal.

"And it came out with results that were shocking at the time," Mischel says. The same child who cheated in math class could be honorable in a different class - no cheating. "They were not consistently anything," he says. "They were inconsistent in their honesty."

The studies Mischel was reviewing were all looking for consistency in personality across situations - and none of them were finding it.

And researchers seemed to be ignoring this, dismissing the fact that study after study was finding no consistency in personality.

Mischel ended up writing a book called Personality and Assessment in 1968 that challenged some of the most basic ideas we have about the role personality plays in our lives. He said that the idea that our personality traits are consistent is pretty much a mirage.

But that idea was so hard for people to wrap their heads around. Mischel tried in many ways to make it stick, but never did. In fact, the irony of Walter Mischel's career is that he himself is remembered as proving the very opposite of what he actually believes.

It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on YouTube. Mischel would give a small child a marshmallow, a cookie or a pretzel, telling her or him that they could eat it now - or if they could wait for a few minutes, they'd get two marshmallows or cookies. Then he left the room. Given that the children in the study were 4 to 6 years old, the marshmallow often got gobbled up.

But sometimes Mischel told the child ahead of time that she could just pretend that the marshmallow was not really there. Then "the same child waits 15 minutes," he says now. "It's a very small change that's been made in how the child is representing the object - is it real or is it a picture? And by changing the representation, you dramatically change her behavior."

The vast majority of children in Mischel's study were able to delay gratification when they reframed their interpretations of the situation in front of them.

The point of the marshmallow test was to show how flexible people are - how easily changed if they simply reinterpret the way they frame the situation around them. But that's not the moral that our culture drew from the marshmallow study. We decided that those traits in the preschoolers were fixed - that their self-control at age 4 determined their success throughout life. They're happier, have better relationships, do better at school and at work.

The marshmallow test became the poster child for the idea that there are specific personality traits that are stable and consistent. And this drives Walter Mischel crazy.

"That iconic story is upside-down wrong," Mischel says. "That your future is in a marshmallow. Because it isn't."

So how did we get it so wrong? Psychologists have come up with all sorts of theories. One is that the consistency we see in people's personalities is an illusion that we create. No matter how people behave, we shoehorn them into the idea we already have of them.

Lee Ross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has another intriguing idea. He had read Mischel's book on personality when it came out in the 1960s and immediately understood the profound puzzle it presented. He thinks we actually are seeing consistency in human behavior, but we're getting the reason for it wrong. "We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation," he says.

Most of us are usually living in situations that are pretty much the same from day to day, Ross says. And since the circumstances are consistent, our behavior is, too.

But sometimes the dynamics at work and home ask us to be different people. The violent gangster at work may be the kind father at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of experiments were done where the researchers put people in an extreme situation to see if it would change their behavior.

One of the most infamous is the obedience experiment done in the 1960s, by Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University who was intrigued by the concepts of conformity and authority. In the experiment, a "learner" was wired with electrodes, and a "teacher" was told to give the learner an electric shock every time they got an answer wrong. The learner wasn't actually getting shocked; the part was played by actors who pretended to be hurt. But the teachers didn't know that, and they kept administering what they thought were stronger and stronger shocks, even as it made them very uncomfortable, because they were in a situation that required them to do it.

The point, Ross says, is that ultimately it's the situation, not the person, that determines things. "People are predictable, that's true," he says. "But they're predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and the roles they're occupying and the relationships they have with us."

Even though these experiments were done almost 50 years ago, we're still struggling with the notion that human personality and behavior isn't a constant. Consider the story of Delia Cohen. Like most of us, she believed in a core consistency in humans; she'd seen it in people her whole life. The good people were good; the bad, bad.

Cohen had been doing some work for the TED organization, the one that does TED talks, and had heard about a TEDx event that was put on in a prison, by prisoners. So she went to Marion Correctional Institution in Marion, Ohio, to see it.

One of the first prisoners she met was a man named Dan. He had the word "hatred" tattooed on the back of his neck.

But as soon as she started talking to Dan, Cohen completely forgot about the tattoo. His personality didn't seem to have anything to do with hatred.

The prisoners' presentation included poetry and music. Cohen liked it so much that she told Dan she wanted to work with him to re-create it in prisons across the country. Then a friend of hers Googled Dan and started reading descriptions of his crime to Delia. It turned out that Dan was a sexual predator who had raped a woman at knife point. Cohen says: "I was absolutely horrified."

She went home and tried to figure out how she should think about Dan (the prison asked us not to use his full name so it would be less difficult for his victim). Was he the kind, creative, competent person she had met, or the brutal, sadistic personality who had committed the crime?

To find out, she decided to ask him. She sent him an email.

"I've had a lot of people contact me," Dan says. "I don't know if they see some of my poetry online or they see something about me and they write me." Then at some point those correspondents Google Dan like Cohen's friend did, and they vanish. "So I'm kind of used to people having adverse reactions."

Dan emailed Cohen back, saying he was willing to talk with her about his crime. But the conversation didn't go well. "It was an incredibly awkward conversation," Cohen says. "Basically he said he was a horrible, horrible person."

After talking for almost an hour, Cohen didn't feel like she was any closer to answering the question that plagued her: Was there something in Dan's personality that caused the crime, and did that thing still exist?

We decided to ask Dan ourselves.

When he committed the crime, Dan says, "I was a real live piece of s***." But he says that person has ceased to exist.

It happened six or seven years into prison, Dan says. His best friend in prison had stolen something from another inmate, and Dan, who had a reputation for being violent, told the other inmate to back off. Then he went back to his best friend and beat him up.

"I remember while I was doing it, he was asking me to stop, and I was like, 'How could you be so stupid? I'm going to beat the stupid out of you.' "

Dan remembers looking down at the man he was beating, and thinking, "Whoa, what am I doing? This is someone I say I love. This is someone I care about. This is someone I say I treat like family. And this is how you treat family?"

Dan says that's the last time he was physically violent. He decided to quit the group of guys he hung out with in prison. He physically isolated himself. It was hard. "It was easier to be a no-good m*****-f***** than it was to be alone."

Dan says it took him about two years to reconfigure his personality. He wanted to be less aggressive, less impulsive, more conscientious. He says he's now a different person. But he knows most people won't see him that way.

"I'm forever going to be a criminal," he says, "which I'm not. I've become a completely different human being at this point."

Delia Cohen had a hard time accepting that Dan had changed; you hear those words so often from people, and they're often not true. But she decided to suspend her disbelief and work with him on the TEDx project. They started exchanging emails.

Cohen knew that there are people whose horrible crimes really do emanate from their personalities, such as psychopaths. But after more than a year of working with Dan, Cohen felt sure he wasn't a psychopath.

As she tried to figure out if something rotten remained in Dan and the other prisoners she worked with, she decided to reject the frame of reference she used to think about people. "All these people I've met that have done really horrible things are not horrible people," Cohen says. "They're not bad people. Which was shocking to me."

She's still working with prisoners on the TEDx project, and she says she no longer even thinks about their crimes. "I'm more curious about who they are now."

Even though Dan says he's no longer the man who committed the crime, he knows why he's in prison. "I have to atone for my crime. But I realize now I'm just paying for someone else's debt. The person who committed the crime no longer exists."

There's something more than a little disturbing about that sentence - being in prison now for someone else's crime. But just because it's disturbing doesn't mean it can't be true.

"Maybe we're not thinking right about who we are and what we could be," says Walter Mischel.

It's no wonder, Mischel says, that we're drawn to this idea that personality is important and stable. It makes us feel better. "I mean, how can you marry anybody unless you believe that they are basically going to stay the way that you have them pictured now?" he asks. "We like to feel like we're living in a stable world."

We realize the outside world can change in a heartbeat, "but when it comes to human beings, we really don't have tolerance for realizing that there is an enormous amount of instability."

Still, we're not slaves to that instability. Traits and life situations both affect our behavior, Mischel says. But so do our minds.

The beliefs, assumptions, expectations that you've gotten from your friends, family, culture - those things, Mischel explains, are the filter through which you see the world. Your mind stands between who you are, your personality and whatever situation you are in. It interprets the world around it, and how it feels about what it sees. And so when the stuff inside the mind changes, the person changes.

"People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," Milgram says. "To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves."

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Invisibilia: Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?

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Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Invisibilia podcast and program, which is broadcast on participating public radio stations. This story contains language that some may find offensive. This is the story of a prisoner who committed a horrible crime and says he's no longer the same person who did it.

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Article describes how Robert Downey Jr changed after he was released from prison

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Article describes how Robert Downey Jr changed after he was released from prison

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SETTLE DOWN

Robert Downey Jr. and his two-and-a-half-year-old son, Exton, in Downey's 1965 Corvette Stingray.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

FIT FOR A KING

Father and son at play.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

The family is expecting its newest member in November: "A girl," says Downey.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Robert Downey Jr. and his son Exton, photographed in Malibu.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

BILLION-DOLLAR SMILE

With two blockbuster franchises- Iron Man/Avengers and Sherlock Holmes -Downey is now the highest-paid actor in the world.

Photograph by Sam Jones.

Every now and then, you just need to ride. I'm shotgun with Robert Downey Jr., the world's highest-paid actor, strapped in the passenger seat of his black '65 Corvette, which, top down, flashes through the sparse weekday traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, Point Dume jutting into the sea. He's talking about a special afternoon, years ago, during the filming of Up the Academy, a classic bit of late-70s raunch directed by his father, Robert Downey Sr. "Salina, Kansas, that's where we were shooting," says Jr., lingering on the word "Salina," with its resonance of an older, purer America. "I had a little Honda scooter in Salina, a tiny thing, not even a motorcycle, because I wasn't old enough to drive, and one day, a girl in the movie, Stacey Nelkin, a natural beauty with an unbelievable rack, asked me to ride her from the set back to the hotel where we were staying, and she got behind me, and snuggled up and pressed against me the whole way. I won't say it made me want to be an actor, but that ride did change my life. Utterly and completely."

Downey, 49, in sunglasses and baseball hat, oblivious to the look that registers on the face of each driver he leaves behind-son of a bitch, I've just been dusted by Iron Man!-is behaving like a movie star. Which is a good thing. For a while back there, in case you weren't paying attention, he wasn't a movie star. He was a convict, or, to quote Hank Williams, a number, not a name. Inmate P50522. A cog in the penal system. After a succession of arrests (getting wasted, getting busted, ditching rehab), he'd been sent to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, in Corcoran, California. High minimum-security.

But this was Robert Downey Jr., meaning that the time in stir was, for him, more productive than 10 semesters with Strasberg. Not only did it afford him a helpful glimpse of his professional mortality, it put him in touch with the bedrock truth, aged him like leather, lending his work, which has always been prized, a new depth. You enjoy him as you enjoy middle-aged, post-Ava Gardner Sinatra. It's not just the song you hear, but the entire life, the story of the man who's been up and down and is up again: riding high in April, shot down in May, back on top in June. If you watch the movies he's made since regaining his freedom, you realize that the best of them play as retellings of his own story: death and rebirth, a journey through a nighttime world, redemption. The prime example is Iron Man, mega-hit and sequels, which is tabloid Downey turned into parable: Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist, a man of private jets, drunken sprees, supermodels, is led, by his arrogance, down the wrong path. His car is set upon by terrorists, just as the Malibu sheriffs once set upon another car in the hills. He makes a run for it, in his suit, but is caught, shackled, beaten, and confined to a cave where the only natural thing to do is die. But he doesn't die. He's rejuvenated. He comes out like a man from a cannon, in a suit of armor, devastating his enemies. He's returned to his old life, only now, like a hero in a folktale, understands it for the first time.

"Job one is get out of that cave," Downey told me. "A lot of people do get out but don't change. So the thing is to get out and recognize the significance of that aggressive denial of your fate, come through the crucible forged into a stronger metal. Or whatever. But I don't even know if that was my experience. It's funny: five years ago, I would've made it sound like I'm conscious of my own participation in seizing the similarities. But so many things have become less certain. I swear to God. I am not my story."

In this way, Robert Downey Jr. enters his third incarnation. In the first, he was a wunderkind of Brat Pack movies, the kid who could assume any form, play any role. In the second, after returning from prison, he re-invented a genre and re-filled the coffers. In the third, which begins now, he's a producer and filmmaker, the co-head, with his wife, Susan Downey, of his own production company, Team Downey, which this month debuts its first feature, The Judge. In it, Downey plays prodigal son to Robert Duvall, who stands for all those fathers who find us wanting.

"It was the least likely first Team Downey project, but there was something in the process that was so provocative," Downey said. "I'd find myself tearing up during every work session, because of constellations being lit by the subject matter, this idea of going home, what it is to return, fractured relationships, the drama of it. It was a big experiment-with Susan's cred and my bit of leverage. How do we do it when we get the opportunity? O.K., here's all the rope, guys."

Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, but Fitzgerald was a schmuck.

Malibu

'Is it fast?"

"Is what fast?"

"The Corvette."

"Judge for yourself," says Downey, putting the hammer down. There's a hesitation, then the car launches, blasted to ludicrous speed, speedometer climbing. "Duvall would call this car a bombproof horse. That means, a bomb goes off and the horse does not flinch. The only problem is stopping. If a car pulls short in front of us . . . Well, we can go to heaven holding hands."

He slows, takes a sharp turn, follows a road to his house. A gate, a camera, a wave of the hand. We coast across gravel, past a giant letter R, placed in the lawn like a bit of Pop art. As Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built, this is the house that Iron Man built. Robert and Susan purchased it not long after the grosses came in-seven acres above the Pacific. It rambles in a midcentury way. Downey lives with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old son, Exton, as well as a coffee machine and cats. Two of them. Incredibly furry. He has a chef and a handful of assistants, including a do-everything body man, blue-eyed Jimmy Rich, who has "Iron Man" tattooed on his calf. (Hope he never gets fired.) Downey has tattoos of his own, including "Suzie Q" on his shoulder, in tribute to his wife.

He leads me inside, sits me in the kitchen, and makes me coffee. It's strong and delicious. We drink as we talk. It's always jarring to meet a star in person. Here's someone you've seen only in two dimensions, as in a dream, suddenly experienced right here, right now, as real as that big letter R on the lawn. Many times, the real person can't live up to the image. It's a letdown. You're sad. Noticing this, they get sad. Then everyone is sad. But it's not the case with Downey, who retains his big-screen aura. Which is why he tests so well. He's got a nearly one-to-one street-to-screen ratio: what you see up there is pretty much what you get down here. Of course, you know what he looks like. Medium-size, skinny, olive-skinned, thick-haired, big-eyed, handsome, even elegant, but not too handsome, and not too elegant. If I were to draw him as a cartoon, he'd be surrounded by jagged lines. That's his energy. Even in person, you behold him as if through tinted glasses. A moment before you remember his battle with addiction, you think, Man, it'd be fun to get fucked up with this guy.

I asked about his life, his childhood, being a parent, his addiction issues. Each question brought 5 or 10 minutes of discursive talk. Deep meanings. Eternal things. When I asked about his early artistic influences, he said, "I was this far away from a black-and-white TV on University Place. It felt like I was born there. I was raised by a black-and-white RCA TV. Rod Serling. Bill Shatner. Hogan's Heroes and Gilligan's Island. The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Antonio Fargas, on Starsky & Hutch and in Putney Swope. Alan Arbus and Hervé Villechaize, in Greaser's Palace and on Fantasy Island. "

There's something both manic and soothing in the way he speaks, the ease of it, how he jumps from topic to topic. Everything reminds him of everything.

When I asked about his father, his face lit up. "If you recall, the first round of really cool head-shop T-shirts-forget the Scott Baio tuxedo shirt-I'm talking about the Superman logo. I remember walking around the Village with my dad wearing a Superman shirt. We also had a prop king's chair, a throne, that he would sit in." "He was Superman and he was ruling?"

"Yeah. And he was a big guy, tall, dark, handsome-all that stuff."

"It sounds like you had an interesting childhood."

"Interesting is correct," said Downey. "I've heard of people that had impossible-to-defend childhoods, and I say, 'You had an interesting childhood.' And occasionally it's the folks who have had the most quote-unquote interesting childhoods and the most here-come-the-sirens idiosyncratic dispositions who push [the boundaries]. It's amazing how many world leaders and icons were psychotic, or had breakdowns or whatever."

Robert Downey Sr. made groundbreaking movies, many of them of the art-house variety. At his peak, in the 1970s, when Jr. was impressionable and small, Sr. was at the center of a creative scene, making Jr. the kid wandering among drunken adults. His mom, Elsie Downey, was a writer and actress. There was a divorce. Downey followed his parents from place to place, living, variously, in Forest Hills, London, Santa Monica, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village. We discussed the word "peripatetic," which we agreed was perfect. He likened himself to an army brat, only his father's war was to get green-lighted, start casting. In New York and Los Angeles, Jr. was at some of the greatest parties of the 70s. It accelerated him, one incident at a time, toward knowledge, adulthood, the most famous being the night he shared a joint with his old man. He was six or seven. In this way, Downey was introduced to showbiz as the child of a mobster would be introduced to The Life.

From the start, acting was a natural thing, separated from everyday walking around by the flimsiest of curtains. He turned up in his father's movies, first in Pound. He was five years old. He played a puppy. Then in Greaser's Palace, a cult classic, when he was seven. When I asked Downey how he had learned his craft, he said, "Doing little one-acts at the Stage Door. Or from Mr. Jellison, the theater-arts teacher at Santa Monica High School. Or Ramon Estevez, the middle brother of Charlie and Emilio, who taught me how to tap-dance for Oklahoma. Before I came west, at middle school, Simon Baruch, East 21st and Second, we did Hair." In this way, he came on the scene as you enter a lake-slowly, little by little, then all at once, so that, by the time he made his first big splash, he seemed at once brand-new and as if he'd been around forever. He worked for John Hughes in Weird Science and with Sarah Jessica Parker in Firstborn and Girls Just Want to Have Fun; they dated for years. He was a featured player on Saturday Night Live, part of the ill-fated 1985 cast that included Randy Quaid and Joan Cusack. He acted with Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. But that big splash came in 1987, as the lead in Jim Toback's The Pick-Up Artist and then as Julian, the romantic, drug-addled lost boy in the film based on Bret Easton Ellis's novel Less than Zero. Which was tough. I mean, here was a character that millions of people had already imagined. But Downey seemed to re-write the book, replacing Ellis's story with his own. At some point, Julian, wasted party boy, product of radical West Coast excess, morphed into Downey, spawn of Hollywood, drugs, movies, and the rest of it.

That performance defined his early career. How he exposed himself, seemed to open his life to scrutiny. This is when critics began referring to him as the most talented of his generation. A cataract of movies followed, each resulting in another chapter, another friendship, story, or lesson. He starred in 1969 with Kiefer Sutherland, who shared a house with Downey for three years, sons of the Old Guard, tearing through late-80s Hollywood. In Air America, he played opposite Mel Gibson, who remembers Downey's manic energy, "stuff he did in the makeup chair. He'd get the newspaper and riff on the political comment and do it in rhyming couplets. That's what his mind is like. It's a wonder he didn't damage it more." They've remained friends in every kind of weather. In 2011, when Gibson presented Downey with a trophy at the American Cinematheque Awards, Downey talked about Gibson instead of himself, saying, "I humbly ask that you join me-unless you are completely without sin, and in which case you picked the wrong fucking industry-in forgiving my friend his trespasses, offering him the same clean slate you have me and allowing him to continue his great and ongoing contribution to our collective art without shame."

It was Chaplin, Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic, that elevated Downey from sidekick, as he'd been in most earlier appearances. He was not an obvious candidate for Chaplin. Here was the kid who'd played a punk in Weird Science, the grotesque farter from Back to School. Chaplin? It seemed beyond his ability-he'd have to play the Tramp across more than 50 years, when he was young and graceful, old and thick. So Downey went to work, turning himself, bit by bit, into the maestro. Insane falls, the great sad eyes. After he auditioned, there was no one else. By picking Downey to portray one of the most revered figures in film history, Attenborough, the late director of A Bridge Too Far and Gandhi, promoted Downey, put an arm over his shoulder, led him to the inner chamber of the upper room. If, years later, he got a second and a third chance when he was in trouble, this is probably when he earned it. Downey was nominated for an Academy Award but lost to Al Pacino, who won for Scent of a Woman. And yet Chaplin did not make money. Nor had many of Downey's other movies. Critics, yes; audiences, not so much. There's nothing so precarious as the life of an actor who is beloved by intellectuals but does not earn.

Walk and Talk

The sun was a red ball being stuffed into its cabinet behind the sea. Downey's lawn R cast a 15-foot shadow. Dusk was upon Malibu. "Let's take a stroll," said the actor. "I'll give you a tour before it's completely dark."

He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans turned at the cuff. His hair was pushed up in a wild-man-meets-electric-socket sort of way. He popped a piece of gum into his mouth. "Nicorette," he said. "Minimum effective dose, two milligrams." I followed him to a gravel path. We went along, the ocean always before us, talking Iron Man, The Avengers, the resurgence of Marvel Comics. "I've gone from being convinced that I am the sole integer in the approbation of a phenomenon to realizing that I was the lead in the first of a series of movies that created a chain reaction that, if everything didn't fire the way it was supposed to, there's no operator, no anything. And you go, O.K., life is doing something here that included me but did not require me. But, yes, that role means a lot. Marvel is kind of like this sacred brotherhood."

We stopped at a wooden animal pen a few hundred feet from the house.

"What's this?" I asked.

"An animal pen."

"What's in it?"

"Animals."

He opened the door, and we saw two goats with buckteeth inside. One was peeing on the ground while the other just stared. Across the way were his alpacas, four ludicrous-looking animals, the only beasts God made in the second week. "That's Fuzzy," he said. "She's friendly. She's the one who actually likes people."

"Why do you have alpacas?"

He thought a moment, then said, "I don't really know."

I told him I'd read somewhere he was a Jewish Buddhist. I thought this might shed light on the alpacas. He looked confused. "A JewBu?" he said. "I heard a friend of mine describing himself and his wife as that. And you know, oftentimes, again, it's 'What's your story? Who are you? Oh, I'm this.' But I wonder if . . . I don't suspect I've really ever been seriously misquoted. So I said that, but it's not true. But, hell, I don't stand by anything I say. Except my word. If I give you my word, isn't that what matters?"

Cars

He led me to a lot covered with cars. Downey's collection. Two dozen vehicles beneath gray tarps, many of which could be identified by shape alone. Like a kid's game, picking out species of fruit by outline.

I pointed to a car and said, "Porsche?"

"Very good!"

"And over there, is that the Corvette?"

"Right again!"

He continued, pointing tarp to tarp. "Ford F150. Bentley given to me in lieu of back-end payment for Iron Man 3. Volvo. That's a Woody. That's a 1970 Boss 302 Mustang. That's a 1970 Mercedes-Benz Pagoda. That's my dear friend the Audi, whom I've had a lovely relationship with since the first Iron Man. It's an A8. That's an Audi R7, arguably one of the greatest cars ever made. That's a Mercedes-Benz wagon. That's the 2011 VW GTI."

"Is this a post- Iron Man collection?"

"Are you kidding? Before that, I didn't even have the GTI."

What Makes a Lab Rat Push the Cocaine Button?

Night had come. There was a big moon on the sea. The house was yellow with electric light. We ate in the dining room, side by side as the chef served shrimp on skewers, then pad Thai. I was interested in the bad time, the lost years, drugs and prison, but did not want to be a jerk about it. I eased the conversation into a question about a specific event, sometimes called the Goldilocks incident, in which Downey's neighbors came home to find the actor passed out in their 11-year-old son's bed-apparently because that one was just right.

Downey raised his eyebrows and said, "Yeah, by the way-an uncommon occurrence for me. Happened to be a very public one. I was not a guy who blacked out."

I asked how one beats one's demons.

"For some folks it's just a function of age," he said. "It's perfectly normal for people to be obsessive about something for a period of time, then leave it alone. And what is it that triggers that brain stem to inappropriately interact with the midbrain and tell the forebrain to rationalize an occasional obsession as a dire need? What makes a lab rat push the cocaine button? It's amazing how much mankind, womankind, can do, considering how largely unevolved we are."

Downey told me he's probably inherited his addictions. Which led to a discussion of his son Indio, a 20-year-old musician-from Downey's first marriage, to actress Deborah Falconer-who was recently charged with felony drug possession after "a California cop allegedly saw him take a brazen hit from a cocaine pipe in broad daylight," according to the New York Daily News. "He's his mother's son and my son, and he's come up the chasm much quicker than we did," said Downey. "But that's typical in the Information Age; things get accelerated. You're confronted with histories and predispositions and influences and feelings and unspoken traumas or needs that weren't met, and all of a sudden you're three miles into the woods. Can you help someone get out of those woods? Yes, you can. By not getting lost looking for them."

He thought for a moment, then said, "Pick a dysfunction and it's a family problem."

Downey's sympathy is informed by his past. He started using drugs when he was a kid. It became a serious problem later, in the flush of success, adulation. In June 1996, he was stopped for speeding. The Pacific Coast Highway. The strobe of police lights. The cops searched the car. Heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine. An unloaded .357 Magnum under the passenger seat. Everything else followed with the inevitability of a dream. Sent to live in a rehab facility, he busted out. In Hawaiian shirt and hospital pants. Sent to a more secure facility, he busted out again. He stood before a judge in 1999, begging not to be shipped to prison. "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal." Downey was sentenced to 36 months. He spent just under a year. It was about like you'd expect. Immediately after his release, in 2000, he was signed as a regular cast member on Ally McBeal. He was one of the best things on that show, bringing life to a series at the end of its string. He won a Golden Globe and was the subject of many stories of the comeback variety. Later that year the police, responding to an anonymous call, searched his room at a hotel in Palm Springs. Cocaine and methamphetamine. Fox hired him for a second season regardless. In the spring of 2001, he wandered in a barefoot daze through Culver City, was arrested, and checked himself into rehab. Fox canceled the contract. For a moment, everything hung in the balance. He now seemed uninsurable, meaning he could not get feature work. Mel Gibson stepped forward, casting Downey in a small film, The Singing Detective, and personally vouched for Downey to the production's insurer. It cleared the way for roles in other movies: Gothika; Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang; George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. "Everybody was set to write the guy off, and it was hard to watch, because he's so fucking talented," Gibson told me. "And so you think, What's happening there? And you know he's his own worst enemy. He's flawed. We're all flawed. My God, I'm more flawed than he is! It's something you recognize and have empathy with, but the guy made this amazing bid for life that's nothing short of astounding. I admire him. He's done it himself. Nobody else can do it for you." For Downey, the turnaround began while working on Gothika, as that's when he met Susan Levin, an executive vice president of production for Joel Silver's company, Silver Pictures. Downey fell in love with Levin, a Chicago-area girl who helped channel his manic energy. "We got to know each other on the set in Montreal," she told me. "In an attempt to be professional, I did not think of him in any way other than as an actor. And a nice guy. There was something grounded and normal about him. And it was not until deep into the production that I thought, Maybe there's something more. But even then, I told myself, 'It can't be, because he's an actor and I've got a real job.' That probably took the pressure off. Then, back in L.A., it happened quickly."

They were married in 2005 and started their company a few years later. Their son, Exton, was born in 2012. He's blond and adorable. I saw him swim with Downey. He's still in blissful early life, with no idea that his father is unlike other men.

Iron Man

There was hesitation from the production company. Because here was a big movie, with so much riding on it-the first solo feature from Marvel Studios, which would build a roster around lesser-known superheroes-and here was an actor with a troubled history. "Even when there was resistance, Robert said, I will do whatever it takes, will hang in there, fight for this thing," said Jon Favreau, who directed 2008's Iron Man and its sequel. "It came down to Robert offering to do a screen test. And once we rolled the camera it was inarguable. There was nobody who could say he was not Iron Man."

"It was magical how Robert brought himself to that role," David Dobkin, who directed Downey in The Judge, told me. "Favreau and everyone at Marvel were smart enough to understand this was synergistic. I happen to believe in casting: there's only one person for a part."

Downey followed Iron Man with the best big movies of his career: the Iron Man sequels as well as a second franchise, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes; Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder-it got Downey his second Academy Award nomination; and The Avengers, which, because of Downey's Iron Man contract, earned the actor $50 million. The Avengers: Age of Ultron is in postproduction, Sherlock Holmes 3 is in development. But the movie on his mind now is The Judge: because it's Team Downey; because he produced it with his wife; because it's not about superheroes but human beings, in this case, a defense lawyer, yet still echoes the great Robert Downey Jr. arc from sin to redemption.

The Odyssey

We finished dinner, then sat talking. Downey leaned back, drinking espresso, a window open behind him. He looked tired, but the good kind of tired. Like he'd done a bunch of stuff and now the day was over.

I asked what he planned to do next. He talked about Team Downey. "We've got TV stuff going on, movie stuff, re-interpretations of fables. I swear, story development is an aphrodisiac for Susan and me. I love her mind . . .

"But I'll tell you what I'm really looking forward to," he said, grinning. He hesitated, got up, and ran out of the room. A minute later, he came back with a picture. "You're going to want to put on your reading glasses," he said. It was one of those 3-D sonogram shots that make your unborn baby look like a capsule-bound astronaut, coming at you from deep space. "It's a girl," he said. She was beautiful, eyes closed, fist raised in a power salute. I told Downey he had a Black Panther coming. "And there's something else," he said. We went outside, where, parked in front of the house, was a vehicle under cover. Mammoth, huge. I guessed Hummer. I guessed Range Rover. He laughed as he flipped the tarp. It was a minivan. A Honda Odyssey. Perfect, I thought. In the course of one evening I've seen this man travel the same road as the rest of us, from two-seat sex-drenched muscle machine to casket on wheels, which rocks like a ship and lulls you into middle-aged sleep. "If I'm gonna have two of 'em in car seats," Downey explained, "then I gotta be ready."

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Robert Downey Jr.'s Epic Saga: Addiction, Family Life, and The Judge

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Every now and then, you just need to ride. I'm shotgun with Robert Downey Jr., the world's highest-paid actor, strapped in the passenger seat of his black '65 Corvette, which, top down, flashes through the sparse weekday traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, Point Dume jutting into the sea.

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It's the good thing to understand people's circumstances

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It's the good thing to understand people's circumstances

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Accept the shifting of people's personalities

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Accept the shifting of people's personalities

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We always change through time. We'r a different person at the moment compare to the one when we was a kid. And usually, it's for the better

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Why do people act the way they do? Many of us intuitively gravitate toward explaining human behavior in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that tend to be stable over time and consistent across situations.

This intuition has been a topic of fierce scientific debate since the 1960s, with some psychologists arguing that situations - not traits - are the most important causes of behavior. Some have even argued that personality traits are figments of our imagination that don't exist at all.

But in the past two decades, a large and still-growing body of research has established that personality traits are very much real, and that how people describe someone's personality accurately predicts that person's actual behavior.

The effects of personality traits on behavior are easiest to see when people are observed repeatedly across a variety of situations. On any one occasion, a person's behavior is influenced by both their personality and the situation, as well as other factors such as their current thoughts, feelings and goals. But when someone is observed in many different situations, the influence of personality on behavior is hard to miss. For example, you probably know some people who consistently (but not always) show up on time, and others who consistently run late.

We've also gained a clear sense of which personality traits are most generally useful for understanding behavior. The world's languages include many thousands of words for describing personality, but most of these can be organized in terms of the "Big Five" trait dimensions: extraversion (characterized by adjectives like outgoing, assertive and energetic vs. quiet and reserved); agreeableness (compassionate, respectful and trusting vs. uncaring and argumentative); conscientiousness (orderly, hard-working and responsible vs. disorganized and distractible); negative emotionality (prone to worry, sadness and mood swings vs. calm and emotionally resilient); and open-mindedness (intellectually curious, artistic and imaginative vs. disinterested in art, beauty and abstract ideas).

And while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies, including some of my own, show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks. Sudden, dramatic changes in personality are rare.

Due to their effects on behavior and continuity over time, personality traits help shape the course of people's lives. When measured using scientifically constructed and validated personality tests, like one that Oliver John and I recently developed, the Big Five traits predict a long list of consequential life outcomes: performance in school and at work, relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners, life satisfaction and emotional well-being, physical health and longevity, and many more. Of course, none of these outcomes are entirely determined by personality; all of them are also influenced by people's life circumstances. But personality traits clearly influence people's lives in important ways and help explain why two people in similar circumstances often end up with different outcomes.

Consider one of life's most important and potentially difficult decisions: who (if anyone!) to choose as your mate. The research evidence indicates that personality should play a role in this decision. Studies following couples over time have consistently found that choosing a spouse who is kind, responsible and emotionally resilient will substantially improve your chances of maintaining a stable and satisfying marriage. In fact, personality traits are some of the most powerful predictors of long-term relationship quality.

This is not to say that we've already figured out everything there is to know about personality traits.

For example, we know that personality change can happen, that it usually happens gradually, and that it's usually for the better. But we don't fully understand the causes of personality change just yet.

Research by Brent Roberts, Joshua Jackson, Wiebke Bleidorn and others highlights the importance of social roles. When we invest in a role that calls for particular kinds of behavior, such as a job that calls for being hard-working and responsible, then over time those behaviors tend to become integrated into our personality.

A 2015 study by Nathan Hudson and Chris Fraley indicates that some people may even be able to intentionally change their own personality through sustained personal effort and careful goal-setting. A study of mine published last year, and another by Jule Specht, suggest that positive personality changes accelerate when people are leading meaningful and satisfying lives.

So although we now know a lot more about personality than we did even a few years ago, we certainly don't know everything. The nature, development and consequences of personality traits remain hot topics of research, and we're learning new things all the time. Stay tuned.
Christopher Soto is an associate professor of psychology at Colby College and a member of the executive board of the Association for Research in Personality. Follow him on Twitter @cjsotomatic.

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Personality Can Change Over A Lifetime, And Usually For The Better

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why do people act the way they do? Many of us intuitively gravitate toward explaining human behavior in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that tend to be stable over time and consistent across situations.

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Our personalities and emotions are usually influenced by physical context. Hence, understanding the situation will grant us the ability to understand someone better. 

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Our personalities and emotions are usually influenced by physical context. Hence, understanding the situation will grant us the ability to understand someone better. 