How do we become who we are?

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 psychologi- cal science, I cannot think of it.

 

The phrase “who we are” pertains to person- ality 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 psychologi- cal 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 develop- mental time?

 

In this opening chapter for the Handbook of Personality Development, I consider the emer- gence of personality in two very different sens- es. The first is signaled by my opening question, the developmental question around which the Handbook is constructed. I argue that person- ality 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 autobiographi- cal 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 organiz- ing framework for the Handbook.

 

The second sense of emergence refers to the emergence of personality studies as a legitimate and powerful intellectual movement in psy- chological 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 tumul- tuous 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 his- tory argue that trauma ultimately produced re- silience (Kenrick & Funder, 1988), the insecuri- ties 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 systematical- ly 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

 

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over the past two decades. Its emergence en- ables 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 histori- cal significance: the life of former U.S. Presi- dent 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 intellec- tual space for the field of personality psychol- ogy in the mid-1930s. In the field’s first au- thoritative 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 anthropol- ogy, 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 integra- tive field of psychological study aimed at un- derstanding 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.

 

1. the emergence of Personality 5

 

Trouble

 

But rumblings of discontent could be heard by the early 1960s. A surprisingly contentious de- bate arose regarding the meaning of self-report items commonly used on personality scales. Many items held a social desirability bias, crit- ics observed. Regardless of the content of the item, some respondents may simply rate them- selves in an especially positive and socially de- sirable manner (Crowne & Marlow, 1960), po- tentially 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 dis- agree (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 ar- ticles and monographs on the subject, personal- ity 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 ex- isting 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 confu- sion; and fourth, the combatants finally run out of energy, or others run out of patience, and rea- sonable 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 chal- lenged basic assumptions of personality psy- chology. The dramatic, and sometimes coun- terintuitive, findings of experimental social psychology (e.g., iconic studies by Asch [1955] and Milgram [1974] on conformity and on obe- dience 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 ade- quacy of frameworks for identifying “types” or “kinds” of people and stable individual differ- ences. Both in clinical work and in the study of normal persons, personality diagnosis and as-

 

sessment 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; Rosen- hahn, 1973). The antiwar, civil rights, and wom- en’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, eth- nicity, race, and nation-state. The implicit mes- sage 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 psy- chology 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- middle-class white males.

 

The field of personality psychology endured a number of devastating critiques around this time: Carlson (1971) chastised the field for ig- noring Allport’s original call for idiographic studies; Fiske (1974) despaired that personal- ity constructs were hopelessly imprecise, im- possible to pin down with concrete behaviors; Shweder (1975) suggested that behavioral scien- tists abandon all efforts to study stable individ- ual 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 re- view of the empirical literature, Mischel con- cluded 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, feel- ing, 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 differ- ences in situations are more effective predictors of behavior than are individual differences in personality variables (e.g., traits), which are es- sentially 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

 

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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.

 

Mischel’s critique ignited an internecine feud in personality psychology—what came to be called the person–situation debate. Which is more important in the prediction of behavior: the person (e.g., his or her traits) or the situa- tion? Defenders of the trait position viewed the situationist critique as an indictment on the en- tire field of personality psychology. They had a point: If psychologists could not even concede that individual differences in basic traits pre- dicted, or at least were associated with, cor- responding behavioral trends, then the very existence of personality itself must be called into question (Hogan, DeSoto, & Solano, 1977). From the beginning, the trait advocates were on the defensive.

 

Following Mischel (1968, 1973), the advanc- ing forces for situationism found intellectual sustenance in social learning theory (Bandura, 1971), and they found ideological allies among many social psychologists who tended then to be (by either training or disposition) suspicious of dispositional explanations in psychology. In an ironic turn, the term trait psychologist be- came a label of ill repute in many circles of psy- chological science during the 1970s and early 1980s. Jackson and Paunonen (1980) wryly ob- served that “trait psychologists” seemed then to be viewed “like witches of 300 years ago. . . . [T]here is confidence in their existence, and even possibly their sinister properties, although one is hard pressed to find one in the flesh or even meet someone who has” (p. 523). As if to save the field’s founder from eternal damnation, Zuroff (1986) went to great lengths to prove that Allport himself was not a trait psycholo- gist. Allport never claimed that behavior was perfectly consistent from one situation to the next, Zuroff showed. Nor did he ever claim that individual differences in trait scores perfectly predict individual differences in behavior. But of course, no credible personality psychologist had ever claimed these things!

 

The debate raged on for at least 15 years, dominating the discourse in journals and books published in personality psychology. The controversy produced important conceptual papers, and it led to refinements in research methodology. Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue with Rorer and Widiger’s (1983) assessment, when they concluded, “a great deal of nonsense

 

has been written on the trait–situation topic” (p. 446). By the mid-1980s, both sides in the conflict seemed to settle on the compromise position of interactionism—behavior is a function of the interaction of the person and the situation, a position that each side claimed it had held all along (Maddi, 1984).

 

(Re-)Emergence

 

When the dust finally settled on the person–sit- uation debate, the field of personality psychol- ogy began to make notable progress in fulfill- ing some of the promise that Allport (1937) and Murray (1938) envisioned half a century earlier. By the mid-1990s, signs of the field’s vigorous (re-)emergence were everywhere to be seen.

 

Most important, the field’s cardinal con- struct—the idea of a basic personality trait— began to receive overwhelming empirical sup- port. For example, longitudinal studies began to show that individual differences in disposition- al personality traits are highly stable over long periods of time (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000). Studies of twins suggested substantial heritabil- ity for personality traits (Tellegen et al., 1988). In light of such findings, it is difficult now to argue that traits are merely attributional fictions residing in the heads of personality psycholo- gists.

 

Importantly, studies wherein behavior is ag- gregated across many situations and over time show again and again that individual differ- ences on trait scores are significantly, and often robustly, associated with summary behavioral trends (Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009), even as it remains difficult to predict exactly what a per- son will do in any single situation. Trait scores, moreover, are powerful predictors of many of the most consequential outcomes in human life, including psychological well-being, occu- pational success, marital stability, health, and mortality (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006; Rob- erts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). Forging a much-needed consensus in the 1980s, the Big Five framework now provides an elegant and heuristically powerful scheme for organiz- ing the many dispositional traits that might be invoked to describe and explain variation in human behavior (McCrae & Costa, 1987), and a few rival schemes have also enjoyed signifi- cant notice (Ashton et al., 2004). And neurosci- entists have made important advances in iden- tifying the cortical reward circuits and control systems that constitute the biological bases of traits (DeYoung et al., 2010).

 

1. the emergence of Personality 7

 

With the consolidation of the trait concept, personality psychologists have moved vigor- ously into other important domains to explore features of psychological individuality that go well beyond traits. In the tradition of Murray (1938), motivational approaches to personality have flourished in the past few decades. Draw- ing from theoretical sources as diverse as evolu- tionary theory, lifespan developmental psychol- ogy, self-determination theory, Maslow’s (1968) theory of needs, McClelland’s (1961) theory of social motives, and many other sources, person- ality psychologists have examined the manifes- tations, dynamics, and development of people’s life goals and strivings, generally conceiving of this domain as separate from but complemen- tary to the domain of dispositional personality traits (e.g., Freund & Riediger, 2006; Hofer & Bush, 2011; Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2011; Sheldon & Schuler, 2011). Re- searchers have also redoubled their efforts to understand the role of ideological beliefs and values in personality (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Schwartz, 2009).

 

Over the past two decades, narrative perspec- tives on human lives have gained increasing favor among personality psychologists (McAd- ams & Manczak, 2015). In terms of methodol- ogy, researchers have demonstrated growing interest in assessing features of human person- ality as they are revealed in autobiographical memories and other storied accounts of human experience (Baddeley & Singer, 2007). With respect to theory, McAdams (1996) and others (e.g., McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007) have formulated new conceptions of personality that feature the role of life stories in the construction of the self. A central concept in this literature is narrative identity, which refers to a person’s in- ternalized story of his or her reconstructed past and imagined future, the narrative of how “I came to be the person I am becoming” (McAd- ams & McLean, 2013). Variations in structural and content features of life narratives constitute important individual differences in personal- ity itself, separate from dispositional traits and predictive of important life outcomes above and beyond traits (Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe, & Houle, 2016).

 

In the Meantime . . .

 

During the decades of crisis and revival in per- sonality psychology, researchers in develop- mental psychology were articulating new theo- retical frameworks and empirical agendas for

 

the study of meaningful and orderly psychologi- cal change over time. Just a year after Mischel (1968) threw the field of personality psychology into turmoil, Bowlby (1969) published one of the game-changing psychological books of the 20th century: Attachment and Loss, Volume 1. Almost half a century later, attachment theory continues to stimulate exciting research in de- velopmental psychology, much of which would seem to have direct bearing on the issue of per- sonality development. Surprisingly few explicit connections have been made, however, between personality psychology and the traditions of re- search that have grown up around attachment theory—often grouped by developmentalists under the rubric of socioemotional develop- ment.

 

Going back to Thomas, Chess, and Birch (1970), developmental scientists have examined the early-emerging trends in behavior, emo- tion, and attention that fall under the category of infant temperament. Important advances in this research domain were made throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but it is only within the last decade or so that researchers have system- atically considered the relationship between early temperament and adult personality traits (Rothbart, 2007; Shiner & DeYoung, 2013). Many other important trends in developmental psychology have, until quite recently, barely registered a signal in the mainstream literature on personality psychology. These include the study of childhood agency and the development of competence (Walls & Kollat, 2006), emotion regulation in the family (Thompson & Meyer, 2007), moral development (Narvaez & Laps- ley, 2009), the dynamics of emerging adult- hood (Arnett, 2000), parenting and caregiving through midlife (Lachman, 2001), and the ar- chitecture of development in old age (Baltes, 1997). Moreover, personality psychologists are just beginning to take seriously the lessons of the life-course developmental tradition (Elder, 1995), with its emphasis on linked lives, social convoys, social class, and the exigencies of the historical moment within which a developing human life is situated.

 

Links between the study of personality and the study of human development should have been made decades ago, I would argue. But for their part, personality psychologists were unable to make them. They were unable to make them because for many years the concept of personal- ity itself was not secure enough to warrant ex- pansion into the developmental domain. During the dark days of the person–situation debate,

 

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situationists constructed an image of human life that privileged the influences of short-term ef- fects and constantly changing environments. Therefore, it was incumbent on personality psy- chologists to show that dispositional traits were stable enough and efficacious enough to resist the forces of instability, change, and flux. Sure, contexts change by the moment, but personality perseveres, to some extent at least. Yet the study of human development is fundamentally about change—change over the long haul, rather than from one situation to the next, but change nev- ertheless. Personality psychologists were unable to embrace fully this kind of change—the kind of change that goes under the title of personality development—until they had achieved a suitable level of confidence in the solidity and stability of their own pet constructs and, by extension, the legitimacy of the very idea of human personality.

 

After an extended adolescence, personality psychology has finally emerged as a confident and mature discipline, well positioned to pursue generative collaborations with many different fields in psychology and the behavioral scienc- es. At this moment in history, then, one of the brightest prospects on the horizon is the pursuit of a rich scientific understanding of personality development over the human life course.

 

Personality Development: A Conceptual Itinerary

 

If every human being on the planet were exactly the same, psychological science could still ex- amine fundamental laws of human sensation, perception, emotion, cognition, and social rela- tions. But there would be no field of personal- ity psychology, for personality is fundamentally about difference. Going back to Allport (1937) and Murray (1938), personality psychologists have typically focused less on human nature per se and rather more on variations on the broad theme of human nature—how one person is demonstrably and consequentially different from another. Thus, the fact that human beings evolved to live in social groups is a feature of human nature; the fact that some human beings are more sociable than others, by contrast, is a feature of personality. Personality is about the psychological differences that make the biggest difference for adaptation to social life. Person- ality development, then, is about the temporal course of emergence, growth, change, and con- tinuity as it pertains to these consequential psy- chological differences.

 

In what follows, I briefly sketch a conceptual itinerary for the development of personality over the human life course. An itinerary is like a schedule or guidebook; it labels the main top- ics that will be addressed, and it organizes them into a meaningful sequence. Synthesizing tradi- tional and emerging trends in personality psy- chology and the study of human development, the itinerary I propose identifies three lines of personality development in human beings, each following a sequence from infancy or childhood through late life (McAdams, 2015a, 2015b; Mc- Adams & Olson, 2010).

 

Describing the sense in which a person de- velops as a social actor, the first traces the line of development running from the emergence of temperament differences in infancy to the maturation of dispositional personality traits in the adult years. Depicting a related but dif- ferent sense whereby a person becomes a mo- tivated agent over time, the second line runs from the childhood apprehension of intention- ality through the establishment of life goals and values. Finally, a third line—tracking the de- velopment of the person as an autobiographical author—runs from the emergence of autobio- graphical memory to the construction of a self- defining life story in the adult years.

 

Each of the three lines, then, tracks the de- velopment of characteristic differences among human beings—differences in traits, goals (and values), and narratives, respectively (McAdams & Pals, 2006). Moreover, there is a sense in which the features of the developing social actor emerge first in developmental time, apparent even in temperament dimensions of infancy, whereas features of motivated agency become psychologically apparent later on, and features of autobiographical authorship after that. In other words, the rough contours of traits may emerge first, followed next by goals and values, and finally by the stories people create to make sense of their lives. As suggested in Figure 1.1, the author’s developing stories layer over the agent’s developing goals and values, which in turn layer over the actor’s developing traits. Per- sonality thickens over time.

 

Becoming a Social Actor: From Temperament to Traits

 

The primal arena wherein consequential psy- chological differences between human be- ings are expressed and observed is the group. Human beings evolved to live in complex social

 

1. the emergence of Personality 9

 

groups, striving to get along and to get ahead so as to garner the resources that are needed for survival and reproduction. Within the group, each individual is like an actor on the theatri- cal stage, performing roles in ways that reflect both situational demands and dispositional ten- dencies. In all human groups, social actors ob- serve each other and observe themselves. Over time, observations coalesce into social reputa- tions (Hogan, 1982): Actor A comes to be seen (by others and by the self) as an especially co- operative person on whom group members can count; Actor B exudes energy and confidence; Actor C avoids the limelight; and Actor D is perceived to be unreliable and even malicious, and comes to occupy a marginalized status in the group.

 

Personality begins, then, with the differ- ent reputational signatures that social actors achieve as they jockey for status and acceptance in the group. Reputational signatures are the shorthand mental representations that observers formulate in their minds regarding the disposi- tional traits of the social actors they observe, in- cluding even their own. While people’s disposi- tional traits arise from genetic and experiential factors that reside within the actor, there is still a basic human sense in which the traits live in the group, and are dependent on the group’s im- primatur for their very psychological existence. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, we still must concede that the tree fell. But personality traits, like extraversion and consci- entiousness, have no meaning outside a social context. Not only do other actors need to be present on stage to take part in the performanc- es wherein these traits are expressed, but oth-

 

ers need to observe the performance if the traits are to become known to the group, and thereby captured in social reputations. Ultimately, repu- tational advantages lead to greater acceptance and status in the group, which promote survival and reproductive success. There are few things more important in life than developing person- ality traits that promote the kind of social repu- tations that maximize the chances for success in human groups.

 

Young children first recognize themselves in mirrors and other reflecting objects around age 2 years (Povinelli, 2001). What they liter- ally see is an actor who moves through physical and social space. However, infants are viewed to be social actors by others long before they recognize themselves as such—from the first few weeks of life onward. Like audience mem- bers in the front row of the theater, parents and other observers watch the baby’s every move, ready to assign initial reputational signatures based on the infant’s characteristic emotional and behavioral displays. Here we have a fussy baby. There we have a smiley baby. Here is one who seems to be afraid of people. Formalized in observational protocols and rating scales, developmental psychologists call these differ- ences temperament.

 

Temperament refers mainly to broad indi- vidual differences in behavioral and emotional style, and in emotion regulation, manifest early on in human development. Assumed by some researchers to be inborn or (at minimum) strongly driven by constitutional factors, and assumed by others to be a product of interac- tions between genes and early experience even at this early age, temperament establishes an

 

FIGURE 1.1. Three layers of personality development.

 

Actor: Dispositional Traits

 

Agent: Goals and Values

 

Author: Life Stories

 

La ye

 

r of

 

P er

 

so na

 

lit y

 

Age (in years)

 

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70+

 

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early style of attending, feeling, and behav- ing, through which observers come to recog- nize the young child as a particular kind of social actor. For example, the temperament dimension of positive affectivity captures differences in the extent to which the young child exhibits joy, excitement, enthusiasm, positive approach, and other indices of social and emotional surgency. Negative affectivity tracks differences in fearfulness, behavioral inhibition, avoidance, irritability, and nega- tive response to frustration. Effortful control refers to the child’s voluntary capacity to over- ride momentary impulse in order to attend to the environment in a sustained manner and to enact a more deliberate and reasoned response to situational demands (Rothbart, 2007; Shiner & DeYoung, 2013).

 

Personality and developmental psychologists have recently found common cause in the re- alization that early temperament provides some of the socioemotional material out of which the full-fledged dispositional traits comprising the Big Five framework are formed. Indeed, Shiner (2015) has concluded that temperament and personality traits should “be seen as the same basic set of traits, one manifested early in the life and thus somewhat more limited in scope (temperament) and one manifested a little later in life and broader in scope” (p. 87). A grow- ing number of longitudinal studies document significant continuities between childhood tem- perament dimensions and dispositional features of personality that social actors display later in life (e.g., Moffitt et al., 2011).

 

Still, the road from early temperament to the dispositional traits of adulthood is not smooth and perfectly predictable (e.g., Hampson & Goldberg, 2006). Even though temperament differences may predispose a person to exhibit a particular style of socioemotional performance, a wide range of external factors—from acci- dents to family dynamics to the macro effects of culture and history—will invariably shape the actor’s development (Bleidorn, Kandler, & Caspi, 2014). For example, research shows that the influence of social roles becomes increas- ingly important in the development of personal- ity traits as social actors move into and through adulthood (Specht et al., 2014). Studies have shown that taking on normative roles in fam- ily life, work, and community appears in some cases to promote (and partially mediate) the well-documented developmental trend toward increasing conscientiousness and agreeableness

 

and declining neuroticism across the adult life course. Becoming a parent or a paid employee may require that the social actor demonstrate instrumental competence, commitment, social responsibility, self-control, cooperation, and other signs of psychosocial maturity, indexed by increasing scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness and decreasing scores on the trait of neuroticism in the adult years (Donnellan, Hill, & Roberts, 2015).

 

Becoming a Motivated Agent: From Intentionality to Life Goals

 

Going back to Murray (1938), many personal- ity psychologists have made a sharp distinction between personality traits and motives. If traits pertain to the means people employ in thought, feeling, and behavior, motives typically refer to the ends—the valued goals and strivings peo- ple pursue (Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). According to some theorists, basic motives and goals derive from fundamen- tal human needs (Sheldon & Schuler, 2011). Motivation, then, refers to what people want in life, what they desire, what they hope and plan to attain, as well as what they do not want and thereby seek to avoid. While some personal- ity psychologists argue that traits themselves hold motivational power (Allport, 1961) and that traits imply certain social (and nonsocial) goals (DeYoung, 2015), there exists in person- ality psychology a vast array of constructs that are fundamentally not about how social actors perform their roles (traits) but instead address specifically what valued goals human beings aim to achieve in life. As such, constructs re- lated to human goals, strivings, and values ex- plicitly conceive of the human being as a moti- vated agent—a forward-looking decision maker who articulates plans in order to achieve valued ends (Martin, Sugarman, & Thompson, 2003; Mischel, 1973).

 

How do a person’s characteristic motives, goals, strivings, and values come to be? Some clues may reside in studies of how young chil- dren apprehend and come to understand the issue of human intentionality. By age 1 year, children show a marked interest in intentional, goal-directed action (Woodward, 2009). They turn their attention toward, and sometimes seek to imitate, goal-directed behaviors of oth- ers, more so than random behaviors. They even adjust their own activities and reactions to take into consideration what they perceive to be an-

 

1. the emergence of Personality 11

 

other agent’s intentionality. But it is not until the third or fourth year of life that most children develop an explicit understanding of their own and others’ motivated agency. With the consoli- dation of what developmental psychologists call theory of mind, prekindergarten children come to understand that human agents have desires and beliefs in their minds, and that they act upon these desires and beliefs in a goal-directed manner (Apperly, 2012). This developmental landmark paves the way for the explicit articu- lation of personal goals and plans in the minds of young agents. The effects of parents, school- ing, and other socializing factors strongly shape the nature of children’s developing motivational agendas.

 

Variation in the kinds of motivational agen- das children develop in their daily lives—the characteristic suites of short-term and long- term goals and plans that children articulate in their minds, and the strategies they develop to achieve their goals—marks the emergence of a second layer of personality development. The child’s motivational agenda eventually layers over his or her dispositional traits. The person- ality of a 10-year-old, therefore, is thicker than the personality of a 3-year-old. The younger child is mainly a social actor whose tempera- ment traits comprise the main stuff of personal- ity. The older child is both a social actor and a motivated agent, revealing two different layers or lines of personality development. To compre- hend how the 10-year-old is psychosocially sim- ilar to and different from other 10-year-olds, the psychologist must consider constructs that are drawn from both the trait and the motivational domains. Three-year-old Sally is endowed with high levels of positive affectivity and shows moderate levels of effortful control. Ten-year- old Maria is also endowed with high levels of positive affectivity (we are starting to call it ex- traversion at this point) and shows moderate lev- els of conscientiousness and agreeableness. But Maria also wants to be the best math student in her class, hopes that her divorcing parents will reconcile, plans to quit attending her mother’s church as soon as she is confirmed, fears she will never be popular with the other Latina girls because her skin is darker, and values domestic harmony in her life (“Why do my parents have to fight so much?!”) more than nearly anything else. More so than Sally, furthermore, Maria is a moral agent (Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012). She has an explicit understanding of what is right and wrong, she has a developing moral

 

ideology or value system, and other people hold her accountable for her moral choices.

 

How do people’s motivational agendas de- velop over the course of life? Research from lifespan developmental psychology documents important shifts in the kinds of goals people set forth and their modes of goal engagement. In young adulthood, promotion goals (approach- ing rewards) may prevail over prevention goals (avoiding punishments) as motivated agents vigorously pursue competence (achievement) and relatedness (affiliation) agendas that pri- oritize education, job training, friendship, love, and marriage (Freund & Riediger, 2006). Goals in early adulthood often focus on expanding the self and gaining new information. Young adults are often comfortable with motivational agen- das that contain variegated and even conflicting aims. They frequently employ primary control strategies (Heckhausen, 2011), actively striving to change their environments to fit their goal pursuits.

 

By midlife, however, motivated agents seek to manage their goals so as to minimize con- flict. What Baltes (1997) described as the pro- cesses of selection, optimization, and compen- sation come into major play in the management of goal agendas. Midlife adults pursue a wide range of goals, from running a household to passing on cultural traditions. Goals aimed at making positive contributions to the next gen- eration become more pronounced (McAdams, de St. Aubin, & Logan, 1993). In later adult- hood, prevention focused goals may come to predominate. With increasing age, adults rely more and more on secondary control strategies in goal pursuit, which involve adjusting expec- tations and changing the self in order to adapt to mounting constraints. There is also some evidence to suggest that older adults may invest more heavily in intrinsically valued ends, while pulling back from goals that promote future re- wards, fame, money, and the like (Morgan & Robinson, 2013).

 

Throughout the life course, individual differ- ences in goal pursuit are contoured by gender, race, social class, and other demographic vari- ables (Elder, 1995). Goals and values may also relate in interesting ways to individual differ- ences in dispositional personality traits (Rob- erts & Robins, 2000). As such, lines of person- ality development may run together at times. It is one integrated person, after all, even if that one person operates both as a social actor and a motivated agent.

 

12 I . P e r s o n a l I t y D e v e l o P m e n t a n D H u m a n n a t u r e

 

Becoming an Autobiographical Author: From Episodic Memory to Narrative Identity

 

The past two decades have witnessed an up- surge of interest among social and behavioral scientists in the role of narrative in human be- havior and development. Within personality and developmental psychology, research and theory have identified a third line of personal- ity development, running from the emergence of episodic autobiographical memory in early childhood to the development of a full life story in adulthood (Fivush & Haden, 2003; McAd- ams & McLean, 2013). Early on, children en- code, store, and retrieve memories of particular episodes in their lives. Encouraged by parents at first and later by peers, children tell stories about these events to others. By the time they are 5 or 6 years of age, children implicitly un- derstand that such stories conform to a narrative grammar (Mandler, 1984). Story plots begin in a particular time and place, and involve charac- ters (agents) who act on their desires and beliefs over time. Children expect stories to evoke sus- pense and curiosity, and sometimes humor, and they dismiss as “boring” a narrative account that fails to live up to these emotional standards.

 

It is one thing to tell personal stories about discrete episodes in life—a day at the zoo, a visit to Grandma’s house, a mishap on the play- ground. It is quite another to fashion a narra- tive for one’s life in full. Narrative identity is the story that a person composes about how he or she came to be the person he or she is becom- ing—a selective reconstruction of the past inte- grated with the imagined future, providing a life in full, with some sense of meaning, purpose, and temporal continuity (McAdams, 1996; Mc- Adams & McLean, 2013). In adolescence and the emerging adult years, people typically take on the psychological perspective of an autobio- graphical author, endeavoring to tell and inter- nalize an evolving story for their lives in full. The stories they create and continue to work on throughout the adult years ultimately become an integral part of personality itself. Personal- ity, therefore, thickens again in adolescence and emerging adulthood as the autobiographical author’s narrative identity layers over the goals and values of the motivated agent, which layer over the social actor’s dispositional traits. In a temporal sense, personality also broadens: Dis- positional traits speak mainly to the performa- tive present; goals and values project the agent from the present into the future; and life stories

 

ideally integrate the reconstructed past, experi- enced present, and imagined future into a co- herent narrative identity.

 

Building on memory and storytelling skills developed in childhood, the cognitive aptitudes and personal experiences required for the devel- opment of a full narrative identity begin to come online in adolescence. A key factor is the emer- gence of autobiographical reasoning, which refers to a wide set of interpretive operations through which people derive personal mean- ings from their own autobiographical memories (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Through autobio- graphical reasoning, people may derive an or- ganizing theme to summarize an important fea- ture of their life experience, or string together multiple events from the past in order to explain the development of a particular self characteris- tic, or derive lessons and insights from negative scenes in life, searching for redemptive mean- ings in suffering (McAdams, 2013; McLean & Pratt, 2006). From the early teens through the 20s, furthermore, autobiographical authors de- velop a more detailed understanding of the typi- cal or expected events and transitions that mark the human life course as it plays out in their own culture—when, for example, a person leaves home, how schooling and work are sequenced, the expected progressions of marriage and fam- ily formation, how careers develop, what peo- ple do when they retire, and so on (Thomsen & Berntsen, 2008). These expectations provide an overall developmental/cultural script for the life story, within which—or sometimes against which—the author may construct his or her own personalized narrative identity.

 

Authoring a self-defining life narrative is a process embedded in the social ecology of everyday life (McLean et al., 2007). Narra- tive identity emerges gradually through daily conversations and social interactions, through introspection, through decisions young people make regarding work and love, and through normative and serendipitous passages in life, such as when a student meets with a vocational counselor to discuss “What do I want to do with my life?” or a young couple sits down to write wedding vows. The story continues to develop across the lifespan, incorporating expected developmental milestones and the many unex- pected turns that a life may take.

 

Life stories are profoundly shaped by his- tory and culture. Culture provides a menu of plots, images, characters, and themes for liv- ing a human life, and autobiographical authors

 

1. the emergence of Personality 13

 

appropriate those features from the menu that seem best to convey their own lived experi- ence (McAdams, 2013). Culture, moreover, may exert more hegemonic and marginalizing effects on the construction of narrative identity as authors run up against the constraints to self- definition that societal institutions and cultural meaning systems apply to particular demo- graphic groups—to women as opposed to men, for example, to ethnic minorities, or to those who deviate in some way from the favored nar- ratives for living a good life (Hammack, 2008). As such, a life story sometimes says as much about the culture within which a person’s life is embedded as it does about the person’s life itself.

 

A growing body of research examines age differences in life narration (e.g., Baddeley & Singer, 2007; McAdams & Olson, 2010; Pasu- pathi & Mansour, 2006). Overall, middle-aged adults tend to construct life stories that show more sophisticated forms of autobiographical reasoning compared to younger adults. Their stories may be more complex, more coherent, and more psychologically nuanced. Life stories also seem to warm up as people age. Older nar- rators give more emphasis to positive events and tend to downplay the conflicts and strug- gles they have experienced, at least through late midlife. As autobiographical authors grow older, their life stories show a warmer glow, even as the vivid details of what they have ex- perienced in their lives begin to fade.

 

Three Lines of Personality Development in a Single Human Life

 

Ever since Allport (1937) set forth the distinc- tion between nomothetic and idiographic ap- proaches to research, personality psychologists have struggled to reconcile investigations of in- dividual differences with the intensive exami- nation of the single case (Barenbaum & Win- ter, 2008). Although the respective demands of nomothetic and idiographic approaches seem to compete with each other (Holt, 1962), the two derive from a common wellspring: the need to understand variation among persons. Nomo- thetic research examines variation on personal- ity dimensions—dispositional traits, goals and values, and life stories, for example—across many different persons. Idiographic case stud- ies take the idea of variation to the extreme, treating an individual human life as a unique

 

variant on the general design of human na- ture. The intensive study of the individual case can serve many functions (McAdams & West, 1997). In the scientific context of discovery, for example, case studies can generate new ideas and insights that subsequently may be exam- ined in more systematic ways through hypoth- esis-testing, nomothetic research. Cases may also serve the purpose of exemplification—il- lustrating how principles and ideas examined in nomothetic studies manifest themselves in the individual human life, or how they don’t.

 

In this last section of the chapter, my brief commentary on the life and personality of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, serves the purpose of exemplification. The idiographic examination of the individual life illustrates the utility of conceiving of per- sonality development from the three stand- points of the social actor, motivated agent, and autobiographical author. How, then, might the three lines of personality development play out in Obama’s life?

 

The Actor’s Developing Traits

 

Psychological portraits of notable lives often begin with broad trait attributions regarding a person’s unique style of socioemotional perfor- mance. Among U.S. presidents, for example, historians routinely remark upon Abraham’s Lincoln’s “melancholy,” John F. Kennedy’s “charm” and “wit,” Richard M. Nixon’s “in- security,” and Ronald Reagan’s “sunny opti- mism.” While each of these men exhibited a complex psychological makeup, simple trait attributions are often the first things that come to mind in characterizing the broad contours of their social reputations.

 

Reading through representative sources in the historical record, teams of psychologists and historians have rated all of the U.S. chief execu- tives on the Big Five personality traits (Ruben- zer & Faschingbauer, 2004; Simonton, 2006). The scores turn out to exhibit strong interrater reliability, suggesting substantial consensus among independent observers. The rank-order list for the broad trait of extraversion runs from Theodore Roosevelt at the top (followed closely by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) to Calvin Coolidge at the bottom. (In the 1920s, it was re- ported that a woman seated at a dinner party next to the introverted President Coolidge said to him, “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more

 

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than two words out of you.” His famous reply: “You lose.”)

 

In a psychological biography I wrote on Presi- dent George W. Bush, I argued that his high rat- ings on extraversion and his very low standing on the trait of openness to experience were con- sistent with his general decision-making style, as somebody willing to take big risks for posi- tive emotion payoffs while remaining steadfast in the belief that the decisions he did make were categorically right and justified (McAdams, 2011). In the case of Barack Obama, by contrast, ratings on extraversion would surely be much lower than those for Bush, and ratings on open- ness to experience much higher. The one Big Five trait that stands out the clearest for Obama, however, may be neuroticism. Known for his legendary “cool,” even as a teenager, Barack Obama appears to exhibit an emotional and be- havioral style suggestive of unusually low lev- els of neuroticism (N), when compared to other U.S. presidents, and probably when compared as well to today’s American adult population. As evidenced in biographical sources (e.g., Remnick, 2011) and his own autobiographical writings (Obama, 1995), Obama has been con- sistently described as especially calm, emo- tionally tranquil, even-keeled, deliberate, and dispassionate. His friends and supporters view these characteristics as indications of emotional stability, which they are. But his detractors may also have a point when they suggest that his dispositional style of social and emotional per- formance can seem overly detached and even bloodless.

 

Tracking the development of any disposi- tional trait over the life course entails (1) weigh- ing evidence for the trait attribution in the first place (Is Obama really low on N?), (2) searching for temperament precursors early in life (Where did his low N come from?), and (3) tracing the idiographic path whereby the early form or manifestation gradually morphed into the rec- ognizable disposition of the adult social actor (How did his low N develop over time? What were the experiences, environments, and social roles that ultimately contributed to the develop- ment of his low N?). A full analysis of Barack Obama’s personality from the standpoint of a social actor would therefore call upon fam- ily members’ and teachers’ descriptions of the young Barry Obama as an especially even-tem- pered child, rarely subject to strong emotions of anxiety, sadness, or shame. It would examine his mother’s, stepfather’s, and grandparents’ ef-

 

forts to regulate and socialize the young boy’s temperament. It might also pay special atten- tion to Obama’s own strategies of emotion reg- ulation, especially during periods of emotional turmoil surrounding his conflicted relationship with his absent father and his struggles to rec- oncile his mixed racial heritage.

 

The Agent’s Goals and Values

 

As do many children, Barry Obama began to develop explicit goals for his life in the elemen- tary school years. In an essay he wrote in the third grade, he announced that he planned to be President of the United States one day. But most of his goals were rather more humble and mun- dane. For example, when he switched schools at age 10, he worried about fitting into the new en- vironment, and he developed plans to make new friends. Throughout middle childhood and into his adolescence, the young boy experienced strong desires regarding the biological father who had abandoned him and his mother shortly after Barry was born. He peppered his mother with questions about the man, whom he came to imagine as a great scholar and statesman. When Barack Obama, Sr. did indeed return to Hawaii, ever so briefly, to meet his son for the first and only time, Barry reacted with profound disap- pointment and confusion. His father did not seem to be the great man that he had imagined. Yet he held on to the goal to learn more about his father—a goal he eventually achieved as a young adult when he visited his (now deceased) father’s homeland. Barry Obama’s motivation- al agenda changed substantially as he moved through high school. The issue of his mixed- race heritage became especially fraught. “Am I black or am I white?” he asked. Finding an answer became a salient personal goal:

 

I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each pos- sessed its own language and customs and struc- tures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would even- tually cohere. Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with me, a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of a conversation how much she liked Ste- vie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermar- ket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me that I was cool. I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments set me on edge? (Obama, 1995, p. 82)

 

1. the emergence of Personality 15

 

Obama’s goal to integrate the two sides of his racial nature dovetailed with his develop- ing personal ideology. A young man who lived in two different worlds and who experienced the stark contrasts of a mixed heritage came to prioritize the values of tolerance, diversity, and personal exploration. Adopting a thoroughly humanistic ideological perspective (Tomkins, 1987), Obama came to believe that human be- ings should continue to grow and learn and to strive to actualize their potential. And he came to believe that he himself possessed tremendous potential, and that he was destined to achieve great things.

 

The Author’s Story

 

When he enrolled in Occidental College, Obama took classes in politics, history, and lit- erature mainly, and he made friends with the more politically active black students on cam- pus. He wore leather jackets, drank beer, and smoked marijuana. He began to use the name “Barack” to signify a stronger identification with his mythic father and a newfound sense of worldliness and sophistication. After 2 years, he transferred to Columbia University, embark- ing on an especially intense period of social iso- lation, introspection, and identity search. In an interview with Remnick (2011), a middle-aged Obama looks back on this critical period in his life:

 

[At Columbia] a whole bunch of stuff that had been inside of me—questions of identity, ques- tions of purpose, questions of, not just race, but also the international nature of my upbringing— all those things [were] converging in some way. And so there’s this period of time when I move to New York and go to Columbia where I pull in and wrestle with that stuff, and do a lot of writing and a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and a lot of walking through Central Park. And some- how I emerge on the other side to that ready and eager to take a chance in what was a pretty un- likely venture: moving to Chicago and becoming an organizer. So I would say that’s a moment in which I gain a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before. Now, whether it is just a matter of, you know, me hitting a certain age when people start getting a little more serious—whether it was some combination of factors—my father dying, me realizing I had never known him, me mov- ing from Hawaii to a place like New York that stimulates a lot of new ideas—you know, it’s hard to say what exactly prompted that. (in Remnick, 2011, p. 114)

 

At age 24, Obama moved to Chicago to take a position as a community organizer. After 3 years in Chicago, he enrolled in law school, at Harvard. Upon completion of his legal studies, he returned to Chicago, where he worked brief- ly as a lawyer, taught classes at University of Chicago law school, met and married Michelle Robinson, and launched a political career. In Dreams from My Father, Obama (1995) tells the story of his personal development from his early years in Hawaii to the consolidation of his vocation in his early 30s. The book explores his developing understanding of his father, his choice of black over white in developing a racial identity (solidified in his marriage to an African American woman from the South Side of Chi- cago), and his ultimate embrace of community organizing as an arena for actualizing his val- ues and as a launching pad for a political career. The book is essentially a testament of narrative identity—one man’s story (written down and published to wide acclaim) of how he came to be the person he is becoming.

 

As conveyed in Dreams, Obama’s (1995) story is a narrative of ascent and redemption (McAdams, 2013; Remnick, 2011). On a per- sonal level, the story tracks the protagonist’s development from relatively humble begin- nings, and through a protracted period of con- fusion and identity search, to the realization of a generative vocation in life. A growing body of nomothetic research on narrative identity shows that redemptive stories like these tend to be associated with high levels of psychological well-being and generativity, especially among midlife American adults (McAdams, 2013; Mc- Adams & Guo, 2015).

 

In Obama’s case, furthermore, the narrative appropriates a strong line of African American storytelling, both personal and cultural, that chronicles the liberation of the oppressed and the hope for a more just society. The story’s theme is captured in the hallowed words of Mar- tin Luther King, Jr.: The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Although Obama never experienced the horrors of slavery and the indignities of Jim Crow racism, he identified strongly with those who have and with those heroes who dedicated their lives to liberation. In the narrative identity he constructed for his own life, Obama plays the Old Testament role of Joshua to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Moses. King famously proclaimed, “I might not see the Promised Land,” referencing the biblical story of Moses, who led the Israelites for decades but

 

16 I . P e r s o n a l I t y D e v e l o P m e n t a n D H u m a n n a t u r e

 

died before they reached the Promised Land. Joshua was his successor.

 

But Obama’s story suggests that he might in- deed see it, as Joshua did, or at least move things forward such that a full sighting might be not too far in the future. Given the ambiguities of history, we may never know whether Obama’s presidency helped moved the country forward in the way he imagined. But it is nonetheless rather remarkable that Barack Obama authored this audacious and quintessentially redemptive life story when he was in his mid-30s, long be- fore anybody (except Obama himself) imagined he might become President of the United States.

 

Conclusion

 

The emergence of personality may be con- strued in both historical and developmental terms. With respect to history, how did the field of personality psychology come to be? On the topic of development, how does personality it- self emerge and develop across the human life course?

 

As the scientific study of psychological in- dividuality, the field of personality psychology has experienced a difficult and conflicted histo- ry, reaching something of a nadir in the 1970s. During that decade, many psychologists came to question the scientific credibility of the very concept of personality, focusing their critique mainly on the legitimacy of dispositional per- sonality traits. The protracted crisis in the field delayed for decades any serious consideration of how personality itself develops. Until relatively recently, therefore, the fields of personality psy- chology and developmental psychology traveled on separate tracks. With the reemergence of a revitalized and robust science of personality psychology over the past couple of decades, the time is now right for a systematic examination of personality development.

 

How, then, should personality development be conceived? I offer a conceptual itinerary for approaching the topic of personality develop- ment. My central thesis is that personality de- velops along three separate but related lines: (1) from infant temperament to the articulation of adult personality traits (personality from the standpoint of the social actor), (2) from child- hood intentionality to the development of life goals and values (personality from the stand- point of the motivated agent), and (3) from the emergence of episodic memory in childhood to

 

the construction of narrative identity (personal- ity from the standpoint of the autobiographical author). Over the course of human development, people’s life stories layer over their character- istic goals and values, which in turn layer over their developing dispositional traits. The tri- partite framework helps to organize and make sense of the many different programs of re- search and theory that prevail today in the bur- geoning field of personality development, much of which is featured in the chapters to follow. And it provides a powerful heuristic, I believe, for tracing lines of personality development in the individual human life, as briefly illustrated in the case of Barack Obama.

 

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