McAdams,
D. P., & Olson, B. D. (2010). Personality
Development: Continuity and Change Over the Life Course. Annu. Rev.
Psychol, 61,
517-42. http://jenni.uchicago.edu/Spencer_Conference/Papers%202010/McAdams_Olson_2010_Personality%20Development.pdf
This paper conceives of dispositional
traits, motives and goals, and life narratives as three layers of personality,
each following its own developmental course. Traits emerge first, as broad
individual differences in temperament evident since birth. As temperament dispositions continue to
develop and consolidate in childhood, characteristic motives and goals begin to
appear, revealing the person’s newfound status as a striving agent. In adolescence and young adulthood, a third
layer begins to emerge, even as traits and goals continue to evolve. For
reasons that are cognitive, social, cultural, and existential, the person
eventually becomes an author of his or her own life, constructing and living
within a narrative identity that spells out who he or she was, is, and will be
in time and culture.
The first layer of personality: temperament and dispositional
traits
Dispositional traits are broad, internal
features of psychological individuality that account for consistencies in
behavior, thought, and feeling across situations and over time. Typically
assessed via self-report questionnaires or observer ratings, dispositional
traits position an individual on a series of bipolar, linear continua that
describe the most basic and general dimensions upon which persons are typically
perceived to differ.
This is essentially a
psychometric approach to personality structure, similar to the CHC approach to
the structure of intelligence. CHC is a
product of factor analysis done on hundreds of cognitive tests yielding broad
cognitive abilities constituting intelligence.
The factor structure of personality is a result of factor analytic
research done on personality dispositions yielding different models, one of
them is the five factors model, the BIG5.
Each of the five broad traits in this model is comprised of a number of
specific, narrower traits, just like each broad cognitive ability is comprised
of a number of narrow abilities.
Both approaches, CHC and
the BIG5, even have common ancestry. Sir
Francis Galton, one of the founding fathers of intelligence research, was the
first to hypothesize that it is possible to derive
a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits by sampling language. Raymond Cattell, the first "C" in
the acronym "CHC" (Cattell-Horn-Carroll), factor analyzed adjectives taken from
dictionaries, which he believed were descriptive of observable and
relatively permanent traits. He
constructed a self-report instrument for the 16 clusters of personality traits
he found. Later, Costa and McCrae (1992)
narrowed the number of traits to five.
What are the five personality factors?
·
Openness to experience: (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious).
Appreciation for art, emotion,
adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity
and variety of experience.
·
Conscientiousness: (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless).
A tendency to be organized and dependable, show self discipline, act dutifully , aim for achievement, and
prefer planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
·
Extraversion: (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved).
Energy, positive emotions,
surgency, assertiveness, sociability and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of
others, and talkativeness
·
Agreeableness: (friendly/compassionate vs. analytical/detached).
A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
·
Neuroticism: (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident).
The tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression and vulnerability.
Most personality
psychologists today see the personality trait as the bedrock, basic unit of
psychological individuality. Traits like extraversion and agreeableness
describe the most fundamental differences between actors that are most readily
detected across situations and over time. So basic are traits in this sense
that some of the same individual-difference dimensions may be consistently
observed among nonhuman animals, even well beyond primates (I can testify to
differences in neuroticism and
agreeableness between dogs I'm familiar with). Dispositional traits speak to broad
differences and consistencies that appear even at the very beginning of the
human life span. Some babies seem
generally cheerful; others distressed. Some consistently approach opportunities
for social rewards; others show marked inhibition. The broad differences in temperament that may
be observed in the early months of life signal the eventual emergence of a
dispositional signature for personality.
In one study, undercontrolled
3-yearolds (impulsive, negativistic, and distractible) tended to show high
levels of self-report and peer-report neuroticism and low levels of
agreeableness and conscientiousness as young adults, whereas children described
as especially inhibited at age 3 (socially reticent and fearful) grew up to
show significantly higher levels of constraint and low levels of
extraversion. In another study, boys and
girls who at ages 4–6 were rated by their parents as especially inhibited were
more likely in young adulthood (mid-20s) to rate themselves as highly
inhibited, to show internalizing problems, and to be delayed in assuming adult
roles regarding work and intimate relationships. In addition, boys rated by
their parents as especially aggressive showed higher levels of young-adult
delinquency.
Studies of identical and fraternal twins
have repeatedly demonstrated that adult personality traits show substantial
heritability quotients (around 50%, and sometimes higher), that shared
environments like overall parenting styles and family income typically account
for little of the variance observed and that nonshared environments (the unique social environment each child
has) appear to exert a substantial effect on the development of traits.
There is an interaction between
temperament and environment: the temperamentally smiley and approachable infant
may tend to evoke warm and friendly responses from others, which over time
become the “environments” that help to reinforce and elaborate initial
temperamental tendencies, sending that smiley child, it would seem, down the
road toward high extraversion (and perhaps high agreeableness) in
adulthood. At school and in the
neighborhood, little extraverts-to-be may select highly social, lively settings
in which to interact, reinforcing the high-extraversion tendencies that, in a
sense, were there all along.
These tendencies to react to, interpret,
select, manipulate, or reject environments in accord with one’s initial
temperament/trait tendencies are the ways in which genes and environments conspire in the gradual elaboration of
childhood temperament into dispositional traits in adulthood.
However, the developmental path from
childhood dimensions to adult traits is not a straightforward and
easy-to-predict thing.
Personality traits perform as well as
measures of IQ and social class in predicting mortality, divorce, and
occupational attainment.
The second layer of personality – motives and goals
This layer consists of motives, goals, plans,
strivings, strategies, values, virtues, schemas, and a range of other
personality constructs that speak mainly to the motivational aspects of human
life. What do people want? What do they value? How do people seek out what they
want and avoid what they fear? How do people develop plans, goals, and programs
for their lives? How do people think about and cope with the conflicts and
challenges they face? What psychological and social tasks await people at
particular stages or times in their lives? Conceptions of personality that
directly address questions like these tend to place human agency at the center
of personality inquiry.
Life is about choice, goals, and hope—the
hope that individuals can achieve their most desired goals). As agentic,
self-determining beings, people do more than merely act in more-or-less
consistent ways across situations and over time. As agents, people make
choices; they plan their lives; they will their very identity into being.
By age four, children have consolidated a
“theory of mind” – they understand that
people’s behavior is motivated by their desires and their beliefs. In
the early school years, children develop specific beliefs and expectancies
about what kinds of desired goals they can and cannot achieve, what sorts of
things they need to do to achieve certain goals, what kinds of thoughts and
plans they should develop to promote goal attainment, what they should hope
for, and when they should give up.
People’s goals may even contradict their
traits. An introverted 40-something man may decide that his new, number-one
goal in life is to find a mate. To launch the project, he may need to engage in
many behaviors and move through many states and situations that do not seem
especially “introverted.” He resolves to do it. The developmental project
trumps his dispositional traits. Should he achieve the goal, he may settle back
into his day-to-day dispositional routine.
Young adults are more likely to try
actively to change the environment to fit their goal pursuits. By contrast,
midlife and older adults are more likely to change the self to adjust to
limitations and constraints in the environment. With some exceptions, older
adults seem to approach goals in a more realistic and prudent manner, realizing
their limitations and conserving their resources to focus on those few goals in
life they consider to be most important. Compared to young adults, they are
often better able to disengage from blocked goals and to rescale personal
expectations in the face of lost goals.
The third layer of personality: the person as the author of his life story
Beginning in the 1980s, psychologists
developed theories of personality that explicitly conceived of the developing
person as a storyteller who draws upon the images, plots, characters, and
themes in the sociocultural world to author a life. The
life story aims to provide a person’s life with unity, purpose, and
meaning. Narrative identity is the storied
understanding that a person develops regarding how he or she came to be and
where he or she is going in life. It is
a narrative reconstruction of the autobiographical past and imagined rendering
of the anticipated future, complete with demarcated chapters, key scenes (high
points, low points, turning points), main characters, and intersecting plot
lines. In modern societies, people begin
to work on their narrative identities in late adolescence and young adulthood,
when individuals are challenged to explore the many adult roles, ideologies,
and occupations society offers so as to commit themselves eventually to a
psychosocial niche in the adult world.
In constructing self-narratives, people
draw on the stories that they learn as active participants in culture; stories
about childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging; stories distinguishing
between what culture glorifies as good characters and vilifies as bad
characters; stories dramatizing full and fragmented lives that may strike the
reader/viewer as exciting, frightening, infuriating, enlightening, admirable,
heroic, dignified, ignoble, disgusting, wise, foolish, or boring.
Culture provides each person with an
extensive anthology of stories from which the person may draw in the authoring of narrative identity. The author must creatively appropriate the
resources at hand while working within the bounds set by social, political,
ideological, and economic realities; by family background and educational
experiences; by gender and role expectations; and by the person’s own
dispositional traits and motives and goals.
By the time they reach kindergarten,
children typically know that such narrative accounts should follow a canonical
story grammar, involving a character/agent who moves in a goal-directed fashion
over time, typically confronting obstacles of some kind, reacting to those
obstacles to push the plot forward toward a concluding resolution. To construct an integrative life story,
however, the person must first know how a typical life is structured— when, for
example, a person leaves home, how schooling and work are sequenced, the
expected progression of marriage and family formation, what people do when they
retire, when people typically die, and so on.
These kinds of normative expectations
are the “cultural concept of
biography.” Children begin to internalize the cultural concept of biography in
elementary school, but considerable learning in this domain will also occur in
adolescence.
Thus personality develops as a dynamic
constellation of dispositional traits, goals and motives and integrative life
stories.
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