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.