The Emergence of Personality

Dan P. McAdams

How do we become who we are? This is the question of personality development. If there is a more compelling question in all of psychological science, I cannot think of it.

The phrase "who we are" pertains to personality itself, which may be conceived as those socially consequential features of a person's psychological makeup that distinguish him or her from other human beings — the psychological differences that make the biggest difference in adaptation to human life. The phrase "how do we become" pertains to development. How does a person's characteristic psychological makeup come to be? How does it emerge, how does it change, and in what ways does it — personality itself — demonstrate continuity over developmental time?

In this opening chapter for the Handbook of Personality Development, I consider the emergence of personality in two very different senses. The first is signaled by my opening question, the developmental question around which the Handbook is constructed. I argue that personality development may be usefully construed from three different standpoints. These are the standpoints of the person as (1) a social actor, (2) a motivated agent, and (3) an autobiographical author (McAdams, 2015a, 2015b; McAdams & Olson, 2010). Each standpoint corresponds to a line of personality development running across the human life course, from infancy through old age. This tripartite conception of personality development provides an organizing framework for the Handbook.

The second sense of emergence refers to the emergence of personality studies as a legitimate and powerful intellectual movement in psychological science. Personality psychology has endured a conflicted history within the broad discipline of psychology. While all fields of study are shaped by their history, personality psychology has an especially notable story to tell, I think, for the field has struggled mightily over the past 40 years to emerge from a difficult past. Let's just say that, beginning in the 1960s, personality psychology went through a tumultuous adolescence, filled with Sturm und Drang (Barenbaum & Winter, 2008; McAdams, 1997). And the field still bears the psychological scars to prove it. While some observers of this history argue that trauma ultimately produced resilience (Kenrick & Funder, 1988), the insecurities and confusions that plagued the field during its protracted adolescence for decades made it nearly impossible to address seriously the topic of personality development. In a nutshell, it was extraordinarily difficult to think systematically about how personality itself might develop when it was not clear what personality itself was, or even if such a thing existed.

Personality psychology finally emerged as a mature and confident scientific discipline over the past two decades. Its emergence enables us now to consider the question of how indeed the phenomenon of personality itself emerges, and how it develops over the human life course. Therefore, current developmental conceptions derive from a historical legacy. In what follows, I consider both senses of the word emergence as applied to personality, then I end with a case example of personality development in one life of substantial historical significance: the life of former U.S. President Barack Obama. Our understanding of the emergence and development of personality across the human life course, shaped as it is by the history of our science, comes fully alive in the close examination of a real human being developing over time.

Struggling to Emerge as a Field: A Brief (and Troubled) History

Early Promise

The future looked bright when Gordon Allport and Henry Murray first carved out an intellectual space for the field of personality psychology in the mid-1930s. In the field's first authoritative text, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, Allport (1937) brought together British and American research on individual differences, German studies of character, and investigations into abnormal psychology and mental hygiene to create a new subdiscipline in psychology. In Explorations in Personality, Murray (1938) took a slightly different tack, drawing more from the psychoanalytic tradition (Freud and Jung, mainly), cultural anthropology, and the case studies he and his colleagues assembled at the Harvard Psychological Clinic; but his take-home message was very similar to Allport's. Both men envisioned an integrative field of psychological study aimed at understanding the whole person. Whereas 1930s experimental psychology dissected persons into their component pieces (sensation, perception, habit, and conditioning) in order to generate universal laws of animal behavior, personality psychology should aim instead to synthesize the psychological pieces, Allport and Murray argued, and to bring inquiry to bear upon the individual human life.

Allport (1937, 1961) was especially sensitive to the tension inherent in such an enterprise, for personality psychology would need to launch nomothetic investigations to examine psychological variation across different human beings, while also conducting idiographic studies that aimed to examine personality structure, dynamics, and development within the single case. In Allport's view, the central construct to be employed in this endeavor was the dispositional personality trait — a position that anticipated the seminal contributions of Cattell (1943), Eysenck (1952), Guilford (1959), and the many personality psychologists who contributed to the formulation of the Big Five trait taxonomy (e.g., Goldberg, 1993; McCrae & Costa, 1987). For Murray (1938), motivational constructs (needs, motives, goals, complexes), rather than traits per se, were deemed to be the most important variables for conceptualizing psychological variation between persons, and the key to understanding the individual life. As such, Murray's perspective anticipated the seminal contributions of McClelland (1961) on need for achievement, Winter (1973) on the power motive, Deci and Ryan (1991) on intrinsic motivation and self-determination, and motivational approaches espoused by Cantor (1990), Emmons (1986), and Sheldon (2004), among others.

The early promise of the field was also captured in the grand theories of personality proposed in the first half of the 20th century, systematized and collated in personality textbooks, such as that of Hall and Lindzey (1957). Broad theoretical conceptions offered by Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers, Maslow, Kelly, and others, as well as by Allport and Murray themselves, provided integrative conceptual frameworks for understanding the whole person, and for specifying the most important individual differences to be studied. In the years immediately following World War II, personality researchers mined these theories for their most valuable constructs, launching innovative research programs to assess and elaborate phenomena such as authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), achievement motivation (McClelland, 1961), anxiety (Taylor, 1953), extraversion (Eysenck, 1952), and identity (Marcia, 1966). During the same period, methodologists published a series of classic papers that extended and refined the science of personality measurement (e.g, Campbell & Fiske, 1959; Cronbach & Meehl, 1955; Loevinger, 1957). Blessed with integrative theories, provocative constructs, and increasingly sophisticated assessment methods, postwar personality psychology seemed destined for success.

Trouble

But rumblings of discontent could be heard by the early 1960s. A surprisingly contentious debate arose regarding the meaning of self-report items commonly used on personality scales. Many items held a social desirability bias, critics observed. Regardless of the content of the item, some respondents may simply rate themselves in an especially positive and socially desirable manner (Crowne & Marlow, 1960), potentially undermining the validity of self-report scales. Similarly, some respondents may tend to agree with nearly any statement about the self (yea-sayers), while others may tend to disagree (nay-sayers), suggesting that test-taking styles (rather than trait-specific content) may ultimately determine people's scores on trait scales. After the publication of hundreds of articles and monographs on the subject, personality psychologists seemed to exhaust the issue, ultimately concluding the following: (1) The problem of test-taking styles is technically real, but mainly trivial and (2) minor tweaks to existing scales can resolve the issue well enough (Block, 1965).

The decade-long debate over response styles foreshadowed the course of future controversies in the field of personality psychology: First, a plausible critique is levied, but in exaggerated terms; second, those who perceive themselves to be targets of the critique respond with fierce counterattack; third, a protracted battle ensues, filling up countless pages in journals and books while spreading a sense of discord and confusion; and fourth, the combatants finally run out of energy, or others run out of patience, and reasonable people conclude that the original critics may have had a point, but they took it way too far.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a number of trends, both in science and in society, that challenged basic assumptions of personality psychology. The dramatic, and sometimes counterintuitive, findings of experimental social psychology (e.g., iconic studies by Asch [1955] and Milgram [1974] on conformity and on obedience to authority) illustrated the power of situational variables to shape behavior, over and against individual differences in personality. Social upheavals cast serious doubt on the adequacy of frameworks for identifying "types" or "kinds" of people and stable individual differences. Both in clinical work and in the study of normal persons, personality diagnosis and assessment came to be viewed in some circles as nothing more than "labeling," promulgated by an establishment interested in retaining its own power, or by small-minded observers under the sway of stereotypes (Goffman, 1961; Rosenhahn, 1973). The antiwar, civil rights, and women's movements all sensitized Americans to the pervasive influence of culture and environment on human behavior and experience — influence experienced in the contexts of family, class, ethnicity, race, and nation-state. The implicit message was this: The person is a product — even a victim — of social context; therefore, one should focus on context rather than the person — on social influence rather than individuality. In addition, some came to see personality psychology as dominated by an Anglo-masculine viewpoint. One could reasonably argue in 1970 that the only whole persons whom personality psychologists ever studied anyway were upper-middleclass white males.

The field of personality psychology endured a number of devastating critiques around this time: Carlson (1971) chastised the field for ignoring Allport's original call for idiographic studies; Fiske (1974) despaired that personality constructs were hopelessly imprecise, impossible to pin down with concrete behaviors; Shweder (1975) suggested that behavioral scientists abandon all efforts to study stable individual differences; and Sechrest (1976) wondered whether there was really a "there" there when it came to the so-called "field" of personality psychology, joking that there are two ways to spell it: c-l-i-n-i-c-a-l and s-o-c-i-a-l.

But the strongest critique came from Mischel (1968), who best captured the cultural ethos of the late 1960s. Based on a highly selective review of the empirical literature, Mischel concluded that personality dispositions, typically measured via paper-and-pencil questionnaires, account for very little of the variance in human behavior. For the most part, there is little cross-situational generality for human thought, feeling, and action, Mischel argued. Instead, what human beings do (and feel and think) tends to be dictated mainly by factors specific to the given situational context. Individual differences in situations are more effective predictors of behavior than are individual differences in personality variables (e.g., traits), which are essentially nothing more than stereotypic labels. Mischel suggested that the only place traits may truly exist is in the minds of personality psychologists. Thus, personality psychologists may be guilty of committing a fundamental attribution error by invoking broad categories concerning internal dispositions to explain (and predict) the behavior of others, labels that they are probably loath to apply to themselves.