Cognition or personality?

Raymond Cattell (the first C in CHC…) considered intelligence to be a facet of personality.  Intelligence/reasoning is one of the 16 personality factors in Cattell's model. 

We know that responses to items in tests that measure intelligence and cognitive abilities also reflect facets of personality, and that responses to items in tests that assess personality also reflect cognitive abilities.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines personality as “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving”.  APA’s 1996 Intelligence Task Force likewise provides a definition of intelligence as “individual differences in the ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought”.

Intelligence, personality and the assessment method

For a combination of historical, accidental, and practical reasons, two broad approaches to measuring these two constructs have emerged and come to dominate how we think of them. For personality, the dominant methodology has to do with endorsements of descriptions of characteristic behavior, thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. The endorsements can be done by the self or by others—peers, teachers, or supervisors. The essence of the method is that it involves evaluating the target’s “characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” represented by descriptions.  For intelligence, the dominant method is the standardized test, with a problem and response format (multiple choice, short answer, and essay), scored as right or wrong, or in some cases, partially right.

However, intelligence can just as easily as personality be evaluated with the statement endorsement methodology. That is, rather than giving a test, we can ask examinees their level of agreement to statements such as “I understand complex ideas”, “I adapt effectively to the environment”, “I learn from experience”, or “I engage in various forms of reasoning to overcome obstacles by taking thought".  The correlation between self-estimates of intelligence and intelligence test scores is about r = 0.33.

In order to have meaning, the assessment of personality via questionnaires should be useful.  It should explain, for example, interpersonal differences in the ability to learn new things and solve new problems, or to explain individual differences in school achievement.   The ways in which people assess their intellectual abilities affect their motivation.  It's possible that these perceptions also affect individual differences in knowledge acquisition and in academic achievement.

Likewise, personality can be measured with tests.  James’ conditional reasoning test (CRT) presents five alternative multiple-choice reading comprehension problems with two correct answers. The two correct answers reflect different world views, which are presumed to be revealed by one’s selection.  There are personality tests that measure the tendency to take risks.  The willingness to exert effort and to persevere can also be measured with simple tests (like processing speed tests).

We see that personality and intelligence are intertwined.  Our challenge, argue Kyllonen and Kell, is to distinguish between the construct we wish to measure (personality or intelligence) and its measurement method.   The present state of affairs, in which the construct and the measurement method are indistinguishable, lead to distortions in our perception of the constructs and in our ability to measure them properly.  Boring said that intelligence is "what intelligence tests measure".  This is also true for personality.  The desired state of affairs is to measure each of these constructs in versatile ways:  with tests, questionnaires and other approaches.  In the existing state of affairs, the method of measurement determines whether we measure personality or intelligence…

Cognitive influences on personality and personality influences on cognition

It's possible to discern between general and specific non-cognitive factors that affect performance in cognitive tests:

General factors: personality traits, attitudes, emotional reactions, habits generally operating in situations like the test situation.  Other influencing factors can be health, motivation, mood, and the person's level of attention.  Personality factors that affect performance in cognitive tests can be, for instance, openness to new experiences, flexibility, the ability to tolerate ambiguousness, frustration and difficulties and the ability to monitor performance.  Personality factors related to externalization can underlie a tendency for speed over acuity.  Anxiety can disrupt cognitive functioning.  A person can have a tendency for internal attribution (I'm not smart enough/when I make an effort I usually succeed) or a tendency for external attribution (these questions are dumb/ I was lucky to be asked about things I just learned in class).  A person's performance can be affected by his perception of his intelligence/cognitive abilities as fixed or flexible.

Specific factors:  attitudes, emotional reactions or habits that arise in response to a specific test.  Training in a similar task can affect the quality of response to a specific test.  Relevant background knowledge can affect the quality of response to a specific test.  The health and fatigue of the child at the time of testing can also affect performance.  If the child is troubled at the time of testing – this can impede his ability to concentrate.

On the other hand there are cognitive and attentional factors that affect performance on personality questionnaires.  A child's linguistic ability can affect his reading comprehension (or listening comprehension, in case we read the items for him).  A child's ability to understand complexity in the wording of the items (fluid ability) and his ability for introspection and mentalization (in its cognitive aspects) can also affect performance.

A child's ability to observe himself from a third person viewpoint, the attentional capacities of the child, the test being culturally and linguistically appropriate for the country in which it is being used, the child's experience or familiarity with questionnaires, the child's strategies for dealing with questionnaires and/or his ability to form such strategies – all these factors influence performance.

In principle, test developers want to minimize the impact of non-cognitive factors on performance in cognitive tests and the impact of cognitive factors on personality questionnaires.  On the other hand, the existence of such influences emphasizes the extent to which these dimensions are not separate in reality.

Typical versus maximal performance.

Personality traits are often defined in terms of typicality—stable patterns of behavior over an extended period of time. If person A frequently acts in an assertive, talkative manner across a wide variety of everyday situations, she would be considered more extraverted overall than person B, who is only moderately talkative and assertive on average. However, person B, if properly motivated, may be able to act in ways more extraverted than usual, and the upper limit of person B’s extraversion may even exceed person A’s, because of situational press.

Intelligence is usually conceptualized and measured in terms of maximal performance - as what people are able to do.  Intelligence is defined as the limit of a person’s intellectual repertoire, which can be expressed when that person is exerting maximum effort.  When intelligence tests are administered under high-stakes conditions, all individuals are expected to be maximally motivated and, as a consequence, cognitive ability is assumed to be the primary (and perhaps only) source of test score variance. As we know from our work with children, the assumption of maximal performance does not always apply.  Nevertheless, since taking an IQ test is a limited-time event, the assumption is that a person can perform maximally throughout the test.  Maximal performance is not possible over longer time periods.

We've noted that personality traits are often conceptualized in terms of typical performance.  Personality is usually measured with questionnaires that refer to typical behaviors and thoughts, and in this respect they are typical performance tests.  But questionnaires are not tests…

What distinguishes between tests that measure maximal versus typical performance?

Maximal performance tests	Typical performance tests
Tests that measure mostly maximal performance:  Wechsler, Kaufman, REY – AVLT, BENDER.	Tests that measure mostly typical performance:  TAT, HTP, reading comprehension (as assessed dynamically with a text).
Typical items: what is South Korea's currency?  Scan these drawings as fast as you can, and when you see a ball, cross it out.	Typical items: tell me a story about this picture; draw a person.  Tell me the story you've just read.
Mostly assess an ability.	Mostly assess a tendency.
Predict ability in situations that are similar to the test situation.	Predict the ability to organize and to respond in ambiguous situations.
Expose mainly product and only a little of the process that led up to it.  Expose knowledge but not the use of knowledge.	Expose both process and product.
The problem is explicit and clear.	Very little instructions.  The person has to decipher the situation, to recognize that there is a problem and to create a solution.
The presented problems are relatively simple.	The presented problems are complex and require the synthesis of ideas, the organization of a sequence of actions, monitoring performance etc.
There usually is only one right solution.	Many "right" answers.
There is a clear performance standard according to which the response is judged.	General criteria for judging the response (coherence, logic, relation with the stimulus etc.)
Coping time with each problem is short.  Because of the short time period, it's possible to invest effort for maximal performance.	Require coping for a long time period - it's harder to maintain maximal performance for an extended time period.

Is it possible to measure intelligence with typical performance tests? Is it meaningful to talk about maximal performance in personality tests?

Typical performance tests assess the tendency to think in different life situations.  The tendency to think is affected by the person's sensitivity to identify moments that call for thinking and by his tendency to invest the necessary energy.  There are individual differences in people's tendency to look for new information in their surroundings, and to act upon the information they discover.

It's important to know how a person usually thinks in ordinary life situations, not only whether he is capable of thinking under maximal performance conditions, that call for solutions to clearly defined problems.  This distinction is important both for task with social – emotional content and for tasks with a cognitive/ achievement content.

Chamorro-Premuzic & Furhnam suggest the term "intellectual competence" as a way to broaden the traditional concept of intelligence.  Intellectual competence refers to a person's ability to acquire knowledge throughout life, an ability that depends not only on traditional cognitive abilities but also on his appraisal of his intelligence and personality traits. 

Intellectual competence is a marker for a person's ability to succeed in professional and learning environments, especially in environments that require both cognitive and emotional adaptation.

Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furhnam, A. (2006). Intellectual competence and the intelligent personality: A third way in differential psychology. Review of General Psychology, 10(3), 251.

Kyllonen,C &  Kell, H. (2018).  Ability Tests Measure Personality, Personality Tests Measure Ability: Disentangling Construct and Method in Evaluating the Relationship between Personality and Ability. Journal of Intelligence.  6, 32.

Personality assessment through computerized linguistic analysis of Facebook messages

Park, G., Schwartz, H. A., Eichstaedt, J. C., Kern, M. L., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. J., ... & Seligman, M. E. (2015). Automatic personality assessment through social media language. Journal of personality and social psychology, 108(6), 934.‏  http://www.peggykern.org/uploads/5/6/6/7/56678211/park_2015_-_automatic_personality_assessment_through_social_media_language.pdf

How do psychologists assess personality?  There are three main ways:  an interview (a conversation with the client), questionnaires (which the client fills out about herself and/or which people who know the client fill out about her), and projective tests (in which, for instance, the client is asked to tell stories about pictures that are presented to her.  We assume that the way the client tells the stories and the content of the stories – for example the interaction between story characters – reflect various aspects of the client's personality).  It's also possible to assess aspects of personality by simulating different social situation (this is usually done by group assessment).

Is it possible to assess personality using the "electronic signature" that every one of us leaves on the internet? Undoubtedly, messages we write in the social media reflect different aspects of our personality.  It's reasonable to assume that when reliable and valid tests that assess personality by analyzing messages in the social media will be made available – they will be used massively.  These tests will be cheap, easy and very fast.  It will be possible to have a persons' "personality profile" within a few seconds.  One may think about the use of these tests by psychologists, corporations that recruit personnel or dating sites…this raises ethical questions like assessing people's personalities without their consent or assessment that is based on things people wrote years before, without considering the future use of the contents of their writings.

In this study, Park and his colleagues (among them Prof. Martin Seligman) used language based analysis (LBA) to analyze Facebook messages. They attempted to predict people's personality traits from the language they use on Facebook.

When personality is assessed in one of the traditional ways, the client knows he is being assessed and this may influence the way he responds (because he wants to present himself in the best possible way).   As opposed to that, when a person writes on Facebook he does so in natural social situations and he tends to disclose a lot of information about himself.  The researchers assumed that social media users typically present their true selves and not just idealized versions.  When personality is assessed in one of the traditional ways, this is done at a specific point in time.  Assessment that is based on the way a person writes on Facebook takes into account his writing across years, not only at a specific point in time.

The LBA software analyzes the use people make of   single  words, nonword symbols (e.g., emoticons, punctuation), multiword phrases and clusters of semantically related words or topics.

The authors used the LBA system to construct a predictive model of personality based on a sample of more than 66 thousand Facebook users.  They tested the model with another sample of 5000 Facebook users. The participants in the research were chosen out of the people that use  myPersonality application.  This application allowed users to take a series of psychological measures and share results with friends. The myPersonality application was installed by roughly 4.5 million users between 2007 and 2012. All users agreed to the anonymous use of their survey responses for research purposes. The analytic sample was a subset of myPersonality who also allowed the application to access their status messages (i.e., brief posts on the user’s main Facebook page). Park et al. limited the analytic sample to users who wrote at least 1,000 words across their status messages, provided their gender and age, and were younger than 65 years of age. They captured every status message written by the study volunteers between January 2009 and November 2011, totaling over 15 million messages. Users wrote an average of 4,107 words across all status messages.

All participants completed measures of personality traits as defined by the NEO-PI-R five factor model/BIG5 model (Costa & McCrae, 1992): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The BIG5 model resulted from factor analyses done by Raymond Cattell and later Costa & McCrae on a very large number of personality traits.  Here are the traits' definitions (from Wikipedia):

·         Openness to experience: (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has.

·         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. It is also a measure of one's trusting and helpful nature, and whether a person is generally well-tempered or not.

·         Neuroticism: (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). The tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. Neuroticism also refers to the degree of emotional stability and impulse control and is sometimes referred to by its low pole, "emotional stability". 

Most theoreticians of personality see the traits as the bedrock of personality.  Traits like extraversion and agreeableness describe the most basic differences between people, differences that can be easily identified by human behavior across situations and time.  These traits are so basic that they stand out even in infancy.  Some babies tend to be happy and some tend to be anxious, some are curious about their surrounding and some are much more reserved. The large differences in temperament in the early months of life gradually develop into personality traits.

Now back to Park et al.s' study.

As was mentioned above, Park and his colleagues tried to predict the BIG5 traits using the language people use on facebook.  They discovered that LBA- based predictions had medium sized correlations with the results of BIG5 questionnaires. The correlations were 0.43 with openness, 0.37 with conscientiousness, 0.42 with extraversion, and 0.35 with agreeableness and neuroticism.  The overall correlation of LBA and BIG5 questionnaires was 0.38.

Predictions of the BIG5 traits using LBA were stable over a six month period. Correlations between predictions of the BIG5 using LBA that were done in six month intervals were 0.70 on average.  In comparison, test–retest correlations of BIG5 questionnaires are usually in the range of 0.65 and 0.85.  Thus the stability of prediction using LBA is similar to that of questionnaires. 

To what extent are LBA predictions of the BIG5 in line with informant reports of the BIG5?  The correlation between self reports and informant reports was 0.32.  The correlation between self reports and LBA predictions was 0.38.  Thus, LBA predictions matched self reports better than informant reports.  However, the authors note that the correlation between self reports and informant reports in this study was lower than usual.  The correlation between informant reports and LBA was 0.24.

The words, phrases and topics of the messages that had the highest correlation with each of the BIG5 traits were in line with thought, feeling and behavior patterns that are typical of each trait.  In the diagram below we can see the language features that were common to people high in extraversion compared to people low in extraversion (introverts).  Each "word cloud" contains the one hundred words and phrases that had the highest correlations with high and low extraversion.  The size of the words is proportional to the size of the correlation.  The color represents the word's frequency (the redder the word, the more frequent it is).

click on image to enlarge.

Aspects of high extraversion are evident in the left panel of Figure 3, including language reflecting positive emotion (e.g., love, :)), enthusiasm (e.g., best, stoked, pumped), and sociability (e.g., party, hanging, dinner with). On the other end, the language of low extraversion (introverts) suggested a more inward focus (e.g., i’ve, i don’t, i should), relatively greater interest in things (vs. people; e.g., computer, book, chemistry), and tentativeness (e.g., probably, suppose, apparently).

I recommend looking at the other word clouds for the rest of the traits.  This is amusing.

The authors conclude by saying that they provided evidence that the language in social media can be harnessed to create a valid and reliable measure of personality. This approach is just one example of how social media can extend assessment to many more people—quickly, cheaply, and with low participant burden. Moreover, this illustrates how computational techniques can reveal new layers of psychological richness in language. Combining these techniques with psychological theory may complement existing measures.

A hybrid approach that combines LBAs with other rich nonverbal data sources from social media (e.g., images, preferences, social network characteristics, etc.) would likely improve predictive performance. Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel (2013) found that Facebook users’ personality traits and other characteristics could be accurately predicted using only users’ preferences or “likes.” Even models built only on social network behavior, such as message frequency and message response time, have been useful in predicting users’ personalities (Adali & Golbeck, 2014). Provided that each source has some unique contribution to a target trait, models combining multiple sources in addition to language may provide even better assessments.

What’s wrong with me? Absolutely nothing

What’s wrong with me? Absolutely nothing | Gabi Ury | 

TEDxSanDiego

A must - see TED talk.

Personality as a multilayered construct

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.