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Rationality is the assumption that people are generally capable of understanding themselves and others.
Typology: Study notes
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In a narrow sense, the five-factor model (FFM) of personality is an empirical gener- alization about the covariation of personal- ity traits. As Digman and Inouye (1986) put it, “if a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is al- most completely accounted for by five robust factors” (p. 116). The five factors, frequently labeled Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Openness (O), Agreeableness (A), and Con- scientiousness (C), have been found not only in the peer rating scales in which they were originally discovered (Tupes & Christal, 1961/1992), but also in self-reports on trait descriptive adjectives (Saucier, 1997), in questionnaire measures of needs and motives (Costa & McCrae, 1988), in expert ratings on the California Q -Set (Lanning, 1994), and in personality disorder symptom clusters (Clark & Livesley, 2002). Much of what psy- chologists mean by the term “personality” is summarized by the FFM, and the model has been of great utility to the field by integrat- ing and systematizing diverse conceptions and measures. In a broader sense, the FFM refers to the entire body of research that it has in- spired, amounting to a reinvigoration of trait psychology itself. Research associated
with the FFM has (1) included studies of diverse populations (McCrae, Terracciano, et al., 2005a), often followed over decades of the lifespan (Terracciano, Costa, & Mc- Crae, 2006); (2) employed multiple meth- ods of assessment (Funder, Kolar, & Black- man, 1995); and (3) even featured case studies (Costa & McCrae, 1998a; McCrae, 1993–1994). As Carlson (1984) might have predicted, these research strategies have paid off handsomely in substantive findings: The FFM “is the Christmas tree on which find- ings of stability, heritability, consensual vali- dation, cross-cultural invariance, and predic- tive utility are hung like ornaments” (Costa & McCrae, 1993, p. 302). After decades of floundering, personality psychology has be- gun to make steady progress, accumulating a store of replicable findings about the origins, development, and functioning of personality traits (McCrae, 2002a). But neither the model itself nor the body of research findings with which it is associated constitutes a theory of personality. A theory organizes findings to tell a coherent story, to bring into focus those issues and phenomena that can and should be explained. As Mayer (1998) argued, personality may be viewed as a system, and an adequate theory of person- ality must provide a definition of the system, a specification of its components, a model of their organization and interaction, and an account of the system’s development. Five-
Robert R. mccrae
Paul T. costa, Jr.
160 ii. ThEorETiCAL PErSPECTiVES
factor theory (FFT; McCrae & Costa, 1996) represents an effort to construct such a theo- ry that is consistent with current knowledge about personality. In this chapter we summa- rize and elaborate it.
Although the FFM is not a theory of person- ality, McCrae and John (1992) argued that it implicitly adopts the basic tenets of trait theory : that individuals can be character- ized in terms of relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions; that traits can be quantitatively assessed; that they show some degree of cross-situational consistency; and so on. The hundreds of studies of per- sonality correlates that employ measures of the FFM both presume and confirm that per- sonality traits exist. It is therefore somewhat surprising that, in a volume on its theoretical basis (Wiggins, 1996), some of the psychologists most closely associated with the FFM explicitly disavowed a trait perspective. Saucier and Goldberg (1996) stated that their “lexical perspective is not an instance of ‘trait theory,’” which they described as “a rubric that may have no meaning outside introductory personality texts” (p. 25). They are concerned only with the phenotypic level of personality and do not even presume that trait descriptive ad- jectives refer to temporally stable attributes. Hogan (1996), who advocates a socioanalyt- ic perspective, argued that personality attri- butes are not neuropsychic structures within the individual, but “categories that people use to evaluate one another” that “reveal the amount of status and acceptance that a per- son has been granted” (p. 173). Responses to personality questionnaires, according to Hogan, are not veridical self-descriptions but strategic self-presentations; socioanalytic theory does not presume that there is any “link between item endorsements and other behavior” (p. 176). Wiggins and Trapnell (1996) follow Sullivan in seeing the locus of personality not within the individual but in patterns of interpersonal relationships; their major conceptual orientation is guided by the metatheoretical concepts of agency and communion. Perhaps these positions can be under- stood historically as reactions to the disrepute into which traits had fallen in the 1970s. To- day, however, they seem needlessly modest:
Why restrict theoretical ambitions to the phe- notypic level, especially in light of the acceler- ating advances in behavior genetics? Why not postulate temporal stability for traits, when stability is already well documented? Why doubt neuropsychic structures exist when many neuroscientists are explicating the bi- ological bases of personality (Canli, 2006)? Why locate personality only in interpersonal space, as Wiggins and Trapnell did, when we can understand interpersonal behavior as a result of characteristics within the individual (Côté & Moskowitz, 1998)? FFT is unabash- edly a trait theory, making full use of the empirical results of the last two decades that constitute the FFM in the broader sense. Personality traits are recognized by lay- persons, who have a rich vocabulary for de- scribing themselves and others (e.g., anxious, bold, curious, docile, efficient ), and traits have been studied formally by psychologists from Francis Galton to Gordon Allport to Hans Eysenck. Despite theoretical distinc- tions, on an empirical level other individual- difference variables (including needs, types, and folk concepts) appear to be closely re- lated to traits (Costa & McCrae, 1988; Mc- Crae & Costa, 1989; McCrae, Costa, & Piedmont, 1993). In fact, most psychological questionnaires measure some form of per- sonality trait, broadly construed. Traits (under one name or another) have proven so very interesting to personal- ity psychologists because they explain much of what defines the individual person—the chosen focus of personologists. Universal characteristics—such as the need for oxygen or the capacity for language—tell us much about the species but nothing about the indi- vidual. Conversely, specific behaviors, tran- sient moods, and biographical details tell us about the individual-in-context but may not permit generalizable insights. From the per- spective of trait theory, these two levels ap- pear to yield only truisms and trivia. By con- trast, traits point to more-or-less consistent and recurrent patterns of acting and reacting that simultaneously characterize individuals and differentiate them from others, and they allow the discovery of empirical generaliza- tions about how others with similar traits are likely to act and react. As a practical matter, trait psycholo- gists do routinely ignore the universal and the particular in their research. Except when dealing with very unusual populations, trait
162 ii. ThEorETiCAL PErSPECTiVES
of lay self-reports are confirmed in the rat- ings of expert observers (Lanning, 1994), re- flected in behavior counts (Funder & Sneed, 1993), based on the structure of the genotype (Yamagata et al., 2006), and so on. The assumption of rationality does not mean that FFT is merely folk psychol- ogy. Lay understanding is largely limited to a superficial level, whereas FFT attempts to account for the underlying structure and its operations. People understand whether someone is arrogant or modest, but they do not intuitively know the heritability of mod- esty, or its lifespan developmental course, or its evolutionary significance. To laypeople, trait psychology is thus like representational art: Viewers recognize the face or flower, al- though they may know nothing about the laws of perspective or the techniques of over- painting. Variability asserts that people differ from each other in psychologically signifi- cant ways—an obvious premise for differ- ential psychology. Note, however, that this position sets trait theories apart from all those views of human nature, philosophical and psychological, that seek a single answer to what human nature is really like. Are people basically selfish or altruistic? Creative or conventional? Purposeful or lazy? Within FFT, those are all meaningless questions; terms such as “creative” and “conventional” define opposite poles of dimensions along which people vary. Proactivity refers to the assumption that the locus of causation of human action is to be sought in the person. It goes without saying that people are not absolute masters of their destinies, and that (consistent with the premise of variability) people differ in the extent to which they control their lives. But trait theory holds that it is worthwhile to seek the origins of behavior in characteristics of the person. People are not passive victims of their life circumstances, nor are they emp- ty organisms programmed by histories of reinforcements. Personality is actively—and interactively—involved in shaping people’s lives (Soldz & Vaillant, 1999). It is important to recognize that proac- tivity of personality is not equivalent to pro- activity of the person; an individual’s proac- tive traits are not necessarily the same as his or her conscious goals. Failure to adhere to a diet may be as much an expression of an individual’s personality as success in dieting;
anxiety and depression may be a person’s own natural, albeit noxious, way of life.
Personality traits are individual-difference variables; to understand them and how they operate, it is necessary to describe personali- ty itself, the dynamic psychological organiza- tion that coordinates experience and action. Previously we described our account of this as a “model of the person,” but to distin- guish it from the FFM, it would perhaps be better to call it the FFT personality system (Costa & McCrae, 1994; McCrae & Costa, 1996). This system is represented schemati- cally in Figure 5.1.
The personality system consists of compo- nents that correspond to the definitions of FFT and dynamic processes that indicate how these components are interrelated— the basic postulates of FFT. The definitions would probably seem reasonable to per- sonologists from many different theoretical backgrounds; the postulates distinguish FFT from most other theories of personality and reflect interpretations of empirical data. The core components of the personality system, indicated in rectangles in Figure 5.1, are designated as basic tendencies , charac- teristic adaptations , and the self-concept — which is actually a subcomponent of char- acteristic adaptations, but one of sufficient interest to warrant its own box. The elliptical peripheral components, which represent the interfaces of personality with adjoining sys- tems, are labeled biological bases , external influences , and the objective biography. Fig- ure 5.1 can be interpreted cross-sectionally as a diagram of how personality operates at any given time; in that case the external influ- ences constitute the situation or context, and the objective biography is a specific instance of behavior, the output of the system. Figure 5.1 can also be interpreted longitudinally to indicate personality development (in basic tendencies and characteristic adaptations) and the evolution of the life course (objective biography). It may be helpful to consider some of the substance of personality to flesh out the abstractions in Figure 5.1. Table 5.1 presents
some examples. For each of the five factors, a single facet (one of the specific traits that define the factor) is identified as a basic ten- dency in the first column of the table. The intrapsychic and interpersonal features that develop over time as expressions of these fac- et traits are illustrated as characteristic adap- tations in the second column, and the third column mentions an instance of behavior—a datum from the objective biography—of an individual characterized by the high or low pole of the facet. At present, FFT has relatively little to say about the peripheral components of the personality system. Biological bases certainly include genes and brain structures, but the precise mechanisms—developmental, neu- roanatomical, or psychophysiological—are not yet specified. Similarly, FFT does not de- tail types of external influences or aspects of the objective biography. Like most theories of personality, FFT presumes that “situa- tion” and “behavior” are more or less self- evident. What FFT does focus attention on is the distinction between basic tendencies (abstract psychological potentials) and char- acteristic adaptations (their concrete mani- festations in the personality system). Some-
what similar distinctions have been made by others—for example, in the familiar contrast of genotypic and phenotypic traits (Wiggins, 1973/1997), and in McAdams’s (1996) dis- tinction between Level 1 and Level 2 per- sonality variables. FFT, however, insists on a distinction that other theories usually make only in passing, and it assigns traits exclu- sively to the category of basic tendencies. In FFT, traits are not patterns of behavior (Buss & Craik, 1983), nor are they the plans, skills, and desires that lead to patterns of behavior (Johnson, 1997). They are directly accessible neither to public observation nor to private introspection. Instead, they are deeper psy- chological entities that can only be inferred from behavior and experience. Self-reports of personality traits are based on such infer- ences, just as observer ratings are. Although it seems to smack of obfus- cation, there are good reasons to uncouple personality traits from the more observable components of personality. Characteristic adaptations—habits, attitudes, skills, roles, relationships—are influenced both by basic tendencies and by external influences. They are characteristic because they reflect the en- during psychological core of the individual, and they are adaptations because they help
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