How to Become an Extrovert: What Actually Changes
How to become an extrovert has an honest answer and a flattering one. The honest answer: you can reliably widen your behavioral range in the situations you care about, and trait extraversion itself moves slowly and only somewhat. This page covers what the evidence supports and what the change costs, and gives you a worksheet for the three situations that actually matter to you.
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About this tool
How to become an extrovert is a fair question with an unglamorous answer: becoming a different person is not the goal, and it is not what the evidence offers. What you can do reliably is widen your behavioral range. You can get better at speaking up in a meeting, at starting a conversation with a stranger, at hosting rather than attending. Trait extraversion itself does move, slowly and only somewhat, mostly through repeated behavior in the service of a goal you actually hold. And if what you want is to stop being bothered by your own preference, that is a different project and often an easier one.
Start with what the trait actually is. Extraversion is one of the five broad trait dimensions that keep emerging from personality research, validated across self-reports and peer ratings by McCrae and Costa (1987). Most people sit near the middle of it rather than at either end. Being lower on it means preferring less social stimulation. It is not shyness, which is discomfort and self-consciousness in company. It is not social anxiety disorder, which is a persistent fear of judgment that interferes with daily life. Heiser, Turner and Beidel (2003) put social phobia at about 18 percent among shy people and 3 percent among non-shy people, and still concluded that social phobia is not merely severe shyness.
Traits are not fixed once you leave school. Roberts and Mroczek (2008) summarized longitudinal evidence that average levels of personality traits keep shifting through middle and old age, with young adulthood the period of largest change, and reported average gains in self-confidence, warmth, self-control, and emotional stability as people age. That is population-level drift rather than a method you can apply on a Tuesday. It does settle the prior question, though: the trait is not a stone. What matters more for one person is whether deliberate change works, and there the picture is clearer than you might expect.
Hudson and Fraley (2015) ran two 16-week studies with undergraduates and found that people who said at the start that they wanted to increase on a given trait tended to report actual increases on it, and that an intervention teaching them to write if-then plans helped them get there while a weaker intervention did not. Hudson, Briley, Chopik and Derringer (2019) then separated wanting from doing across 15 weeks and 377 participants: accepting a weekly behavioral challenge predicted nothing, and completing it predicted trait growth. The mechanism is behavior, not intention. Both studies rest on self-reported personality, which is a real limitation worth holding in mind.
Does acting extraverted feel good? Mostly yes, with an important exception. Zelenski, Santoro and Whelan (2012) found that behaving in an extraverted way raised positive feelings in two short laboratory experiments, with little difference between people high and low on the trait, and that the costs they went looking for showed up mainly for extraverts asked to act introverted. But Jacques-Hamilton, Sun and Smillie (2019) ran a week-long randomized trial in everyday life and found that, although the average effect on positive feelings and authenticity was positive, people lower in trait extraversion gained less and reported more tiredness and less sense of authenticity. Short bursts look cheap. A sustained persona does not.
Hold all of that at the size it actually is. These are small to moderate effects, measured over weeks, mostly in students, mostly self-reported. Nothing in this literature shows a person moving from one end of the dimension to the other, and nothing shows a change holding for years once the behavior stops. What it does support is specific and useful: if you repeatedly do the thing, in situations you care about, you get better at the thing, and you may come to describe yourself a little differently. Treat anything promising a personality transformation in thirty days as advertising rather than evidence.
So the method is: choose situations, not a personality. Name the three settings where being more outgoing would actually change something for you, which for most people is a short list. Speaking in meetings. Hosting rather than attending. Approaching someone at an event. Calling instead of messaging. Then pick one small repeatable behavior for each, specific enough to tick off: ask the first question, arrive ten minutes early and talk to whoever is setting up, say your thing inside the first five minutes. Write a script and a limit, and repeat it on a schedule rather than when you feel like it.
Keep the cost in the plan rather than treating it as a failure of will. If a conference leaves you wordless by mid-afternoon, block out the mid-afternoon. Recovery scheduled in advance is the difference between a practice you keep and three good weeks followed by quiet avoidance. At the review, rate your range rather than your personality: how many of the planned behaviors did you actually do, and what did each one cost? That number improves long before any self-description does, which is exactly what makes it the honest measure of progress.
This page will not promise a personality change and does not treat being an introvert as a flaw. There is nothing to fix in preferring smaller gatherings, and people at the quieter end of the dimension do perfectly well socially. But if what stops you is fear of being judged rather than a preference for less stimulation, you are looking at a different problem with a better-studied solution. Social Anxiety Test is a self-assessment for that, and graded exposure, which Fear Ladder (Exposure Hierarchy) sets out step by step, is the standard approach. Introversion is not anxiety, and the two need different plans.
One more distinction before you start. Introvert or Extrovert Quiz places you on the dimension, and the ambivert test is for people who suspect they sit somewhere in the middle, which most people do. Neither result tells you what to practice, and neither is a verdict on your social life. This page is the practice side: pick the situations, repeat the behavior, count what you did rather than how you now describe yourself. The openers and the mechanics of the situations themselves are covered on the two skills sheets in the related cards below.
References
- McCrae RR, Costa PT. Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1987;52(1):81-90. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.1.81
- Heiser NA, Turner SM, Beidel DC. Shyness: relationship to social phobia and other psychiatric disorders. Behav Res Ther. 2003;41(2):209-221. doi:10.1016/S0005-7967(02)00003-7
- Roberts BW, Mroczek D. Personality trait change in adulthood. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2008;17(1):31-35. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00543.x
- Hudson NW, Fraley RC. Volitional personality trait change: can people choose to change their personality traits? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2015;109(3):490-507. doi:10.1037/pspp0000021
- Hudson NW, Briley DA, Chopik WJ, Derringer J. You have to follow through: attaining behavioral change goals predicts volitional personality change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2019;117(4):839-857. doi:10.1037/pspp0000221
- Jacques-Hamilton R, Sun J, Smillie LD. Costs and benefits of acting extraverted: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2019;148(9):1538-1556. doi:10.1037/xge0000516
- Zelenski JM, Santoro MS, Whelan DC. Would introverts be better off if they acted more like extraverts? Exploring emotional and cognitive consequences of counterdispositional behavior. Emotion. 2012;12(2):290-303. doi:10.1037/a0025169
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, December 4). How to Become an Extrovert. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/how-to-be-more-extroverted
How to Become an Extrovert FAQ
Can you actually become an extrovert?
Not in the sense the question usually means. What the evidence supports is that you can widen your behavioral range, get noticeably better at the specific situations you practice, and shift trait extraversion itself modestly over months. Roberts and Mroczek (2008) showed traits keep moving across adulthood, and Hudson and colleagues showed that people who complete behavioral assignments report trait growth while people who merely accept them do not. So the realistic target is range in the settings you care about, not a different personality by spring.
How can I become more extroverted at work?
Becoming more extroverted at work is best treated as three or four specific behaviors rather than a manner to adopt. Pick the settings that cost you something real: a meeting where your ideas go unheard, a corridor you walk past, a client call you let a colleague take. Then choose one tickable behavior for each, such as saying one thing inside the first five minutes. Write the opener and the exit in advance. Repeat on a schedule rather than when you feel ready, because the research says the doing is what moves anything.
How long does it take to become more outgoing?
Becoming more outgoing shows up in two timescales. The behavior gets easier within weeks, which is what the studies measure: Hudson and Fraley ran theirs over 16 weeks and saw self-reported movement in that window. How you describe yourself changes much more slowly, and the trait-level change reported in this literature is small. So expect the fourth meeting to be easier than the first, and do not expect to feel like a different person. Rating the behaviors you actually completed is the honest measure of progress.
Does acting more extroverted make you happier?
On average yes, and not for everyone. Zelenski, Santoro and Whelan (2012) found behaving in an extraverted way raised positive feelings in short studies with little difference by trait level. But Jacques-Hamilton, Sun and Smillie (2019) ran a week-long randomized trial in daily life and found that people lower in trait extraversion gained less and reported more tiredness and less sense of authenticity. The practical reading: brief bursts are usually a net gain, and keeping up a persona for days is expensive if you sit at the quieter end.
Is being an introvert something to fix?
No. Extraversion is a dimension on which most people sit near the middle, and preferring less social stimulation is not a deficiency any more than preferring more is. People at the quieter end form close relationships, lead teams, and do perfectly well socially. Wanting to become an extrovert is worth examining for what sits underneath it: if the honest answer is that three specific situations are costing you opportunities, practice those three. If the answer is that somewhere along the way you absorbed the idea that quiet is a defect, that belief is the thing worth working on.
What if I am scared rather than just quiet?
Then the route is different and better studied. Introversion is a preference: the evening can be enjoyable and still leave you tired. Social anxiety involves marked fear of being judged, avoidance, physical symptoms, and replaying the event afterward. Heiser, Turner and Beidel (2003) found that most shy people did not have social phobia at all, and concluded that social phobia is not merely severe shyness. Graded exposure is the standard approach for it, so a self-assessment and then a therapist is a better first move than a behavior-range plan.
Will faking it make me feel inauthentic?
Sometimes, and that is a reason to design the practice rather than to abandon it. In the week-long trial by Jacques-Hamilton and colleagues, people lower in trait extraversion reported a weaker sense of authenticity while behaving more extravertedly. The way around it is to pick behaviors that serve something you genuinely want and to keep them short and specific: ask the first question, say your thing, then stop. A sustained persona across a whole conference feels false because it is. One deliberate behavior in a setting that matters does not.