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eMPIrIcal and concePtual Bases
of a PersonalIty tHeory
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-
the five- factor theory of Personality
Robert R. mccrae
Paul T. costa, Jr.
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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.
The FFM and Trait Theory
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
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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.
a unIversal PersonalIty systeM
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.
Components of the Personality System
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
- The Five-Factor Theory of Personality 163
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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3ELF SCHEMAS 0ERSONAL MYTHS
.EUROTICISM %XTRAVERSION /PENNESS !GREEABLENESS #ONSCIENTIOUSNESS
#ULTURAL NORMS ,IFE EVENTS SITUATION
%MOTIONAL REACTIONS -ID CAREER SHIFTS BEHAVIOR
#ULTURALLY CONDITIONED PHENOMENA 0ERSONAL STRIVINGS !TTITUDES
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#HARACTERISTIC !DAPTATIONS
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fIguRe 5.1. A representation of the five-factor theory personality system. Core components are in rectangles; interfacing components are in ellipses. From McCrae and Costa (1996).
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sonality will ultimately include subtheories that elaborate on such specific topics. Table 5.2 lists 16 postulates intended to specify how the personality system operates (McCrae & Costa, 1996, 2006b). Postulates 1b through 2b spell out the ways in which traits develop from biological bases and in- teract with the environment to create char- acteristic adaptations (or maladaptations). Postulate 5a says that behavior is a function
of the interaction of characteristic adapta- tions and external influences. An example of the operation of the system is provided by the need for closure (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). This tendency to “seize” the first cred- ible answer and to “freeze” on one’s initial decisions was shown to be strongly inversely related to Openness to Experience. It is easy to imagine the paths by which such habits of thought might develop:
TABLe 5.2. ffT Postulates
- Basic tendencies
1a. Individuality. All adults can be characterized by their differential standing on a series of personality traits that influence patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. 1b. Origin. Personality traits are endogenous basic tendencies that can be altered by exogenous interventions, processes, or events that affect their biological bases. 1c. Development. The development of personality traits occurs through intrinsic maturation, mostly in the first third of life but continuing across the lifespan; and through other biological processes that alter the basis of traits. 1d. Structure. Traits are organized hierarchically from narrow and specific to broad and general dispositions; Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness constitute the highest level of the hierarchy.
- Characteristic adaptations
2a. Adaptation. Over time, individuals react to their environments by evolving patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are consistent with their personality traits and earlier adaptations. 2b. Maladjustment. At any one time, adaptations may not be optimal with respect to cultural values or personal goals. 2c. Plasticity. Characteristic adaptations change over time in response to biological maturation, social roles and/or expectations, and changes in the environment or deliberate interventions.
- Objective biography
3a. Multiple determination. Action and experience at any given moment are complex functions of all those characteristic adaptations that are evoked by the situation. 3b. Life course. Individuals have plans, schedules, and goals that allow action to be organized over long time intervals in ways that are consistent with their personality traits.
- Self-concept
4a. Self-schema. Individuals maintain a cognitive–affective view of themselves that is accessible to consciousness. 4b. Selective perception. Information is selectively represented in the self-concept in ways that (i) are consistent with personality traits; and (ii) give a sense of coherence to the individual.
- External influences
5a. Interaction. The social and physical environment interacts with personality dispositions to shape characteristic adaptations, and with characteristic adaptations to regulate the flow of behavior. 5b. Apperception. Individuals attend to and construe the environment in ways that are consistent with their personality traits. 5c. Reciprocity. Individuals selectively influence the environment to which they respond.
- Dynamic processes
6a. Universal dynamics. The ongoing functioning of the individual in creating adaptations and expressing them in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is regulated in part by universal cognitive, affective, and volitional mechanisms. 6b. Differential dynamics. Some dynamic processes are differentially affected by basic tendencies of the individual, including personality traits.
Note. Adapted from McCrae and Costa (1996, 2006b).
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Lacking a need for change and uncertainty, closed people come to prefer a simple, struc- tured, familiar world. Through experience they discover that tradition, conventionality, and stereotypes offer tried-and-true answers that they can adopt without much thought. They begin to think of themselves as conservative, down-to-earth people, and they seek out like- minded friends and spouses who will not chal- lenge their beliefs. Thus, Basic Tendencies of closedness develop into preferences, ideologies, self- construals, and social roles; these Charac- teristic Adaptations habitualize, legitimatize, and socially support a way of thinking that ex- presses a high need for closure. (Costa & Mc- Crae, 1998b, p. 117)
Revisions to FFT
The postulates in Table 5.2 are empirically testable, and in fact most of them are based on a body of empirical literature. In a few cases, recent data have suggested the need for revision or clarification of some of the original postulates, and we have proposed new versions (McCrae & Costa, 2006b). Most of the 16 postulates are apparent- ly not controversial. No one seems to dis- pute that people have a self- concept (4a) or that some characteristic adaptations may be maladaptive (2b). In fact, much research has tied maladaptive DSM-IV personality dis- orders to personality traits, consistent with FFT (Costa & Widiger, 2002). Although they did not couch it as a test of FFT, Mc- Adams and his colleagues (2004) recently published data that support Postulate 4b, selective perception. McAdams believes that people come to understand themselves not by amassing a catalogue of relevant descrip- tors but by constructing a coherent life nar- rative (McAdams, 1996; see also Chapter 8, this volume). Given that interpretation of the self- concept, Postulate 4b implies that life narratives should be consistent with per- sonality traits, and this is precisely what Mc- Adams and colleagues found. Stories with themes of sadness and distress were associ- ated with Neuroticism; themes of love and friendship were associated with Agreeable- ness; and the complexity of the narratives was strongly related to Openness to Experi- ence. There are, however, three postulates that have been challenged by recent literature and should be reconsidered.
Issues of Structure
Postulate 1d, Structure , claims that the five factors “constitute the highest level of the hierarchy.” In a major article on personal- ity structure, Markon, Krueger, and Watson (2005) suggested that, although the five fac- tors are most fundamental, there are even broader higher-order factors: At the higher levels, Extraversion and Openness combine to form Digman’s (1997) Personal Growth fac- tor, β; Agreeableness and Conscientiousness combine to form (low) Disinhibition; and Dis- inhibition and Neuroticism merge into Dig- man’s (low) Socialization factor, α. Markon and colleagues argued that each of these levels corresponds to a major model in the litera- ture, and that all of them are useful for some purposes. Should we revise Postulate 1d? Not yet. In 1999 we argued that Dig- man’s factors might well be artifacts of evaluation, specifically, that Socialization corresponded to (low) negative valence, and Personal Growth to positive valence (Mc- Crae & Costa, 1995a). Paulhus and John (1998) argued similarly that factors such as α and β arise from moralistic and egois- tic self-enhancing biases. Strong evidence in favor of an artifactual interpretation was offered by Biesanz and West (2004), who reported multitrait, multimethod confirma- tory factor analyses of self-reports and peer and parent ratings. Within informant type (e.g., self-reports), where evaluative biases are shared, the five factors were intercor- related as Digman predicted. Across infor- mant types, however, the five factors were orthogonal. This study raises the question of whether the higher-order factor structure re- ported by Markon and colleagues (2005) is a product of monomethod assessment: “Theo- retical frameworks that integrate [FFM fac- tors] as facets of a broader construct may need to be reexamined” (Biesanz & West, 2004, p. 871). A lexical study that examined a two-factor solution also failed to replicate Digman’s factors (Ashton, Lee, & Goldberg, 2004). However, recent unpublished analy- ses suggest that the Digman structure may be the result of both within-method bias and substantive higher-order associations; if such findings are replicated, some modification of Postulate 1d would be warranted. Other researchers dispute the claim that personality is well described by only five fac-
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But personality development is a broad- er topic than the development of traits. Pos- tulate 2a acknowledges that characteristic adaptations also evolve over time, and Pos- tulate 3b notes that the life course unfolds under the enduring influence of traits. But characteristic adaptations and the life course are also determined by the environment, in part by shared age norms and expectations (cf. Roberts, Wood, & Smith, 2005), al- though the influence of age norms appears to have declined in modern societies (Neugar- ten, 1982). The developmental psychology of characteristic adaptations is a fertile field for future research and theorizing.
Issues of Origin
Postulate 1b is even more controversial, be- cause it denies any role to the environment in determining trait levels. Decades of personal- ity theorizing on the role of childrearing in shaping adult personality are supported by almost no empirical data, except perhaps in extreme cases (Caspi et al., 2002). The de- bate on the role of adult experience in shap- ing personality continues. As the next section shows, the evidence for Postulate 1b is stron- ger now than it was in 1996. Most behav- ior genetic studies have continued to show little or no role for the shared environment (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001), and ambitious attempts to pin down substantive contribu- tions of the non-shared environment have largely failed (Reiss, Neiderhiser, Hethering- ton, & Plomin, 2000). However, a number of studies have reported findings that seem to imply some role for the environment:
- Living in Canada increased Openness and Agreeableness among Chinese undergrad- uates (McCrae, Yik, Trapnell, Bond, & Paulhus, 1998).
- Work experiences were associated with personality changes in young adults (Rob- erts, Caspi, & Moffit, 2003).
- Physical demands and hazardous work conditions were associated with a decline in trust over a 10-year interval (Sutin & Costa, 2008).
- General cultural changes led to changes in personality traits (Roberts & Helson, 1997).
- Large cohort differences were found in Extraversion in successive generations of college students (Twenge, 2001). - In women, the experience of divorce was related to decreased dominance (Roberts, Helson, & Klohnen, 2002). - In women, the experience of divorce was related to increased Extraversion (Costa, Herbst, McCrae, & Siegler, 2000).
Readers sympathetic to the environ- mental causation hypothesis may take this list as powerful evidence that FFT is flawed, and that there are indeed environmental influences on basic tendencies. But in fact the data do not bear close scrutiny. Domi- nance is strongly related to Extraversion, so why do the Roberts and colleagues’ (2002) and Costa and colleagues’ (2000) studies reach opposite conclusions on the effect of divorce? Twenge’s (2001) dramatic co- hort effects were not replicated in a study of nearly 2,000 adults assessed repeatedly over 15 years (Terracciano et al., 2005). The analyses in Roberts, Caspi, and Moffit are causally ambiguous: They showed that personality changes between ages 18 and 26 were associated with work variables at age 26, but it was not clear whether the changes preceded or followed the work experience. Finally, with the exception of McCrae and colleagues (1998), these studies relied exclu- sively on self-report data, so we do not know whether they reflected changes in personal- ity or merely changes in the self-concept or reporting biases. Under certain conditions the environment may directly affect traits, but that effect has not yet been reliably or pervasively demonstrated. However, there is one undeniable way in which the environment can affect person- ality traits, and that is through the media- tion of biological bases. A metal rod through the brain of 19th-century railroad worker Phineas Gage created dramatic changes in his personality. More benignly, psychotro- pic medications can affect personality traits (Bagby, Levitan, Kennedy, Levitt, & Joffe, 1999). Psychotherapy, a nonbiological in- tervention, can cure depression (a brain dis- ease; Mayberg et al., 2000) and thus lead to changes in personality trait levels (Costa, Bagby, Herbst, & McCrae, 2005). These findings suggest the rephrasing of Postulate 1b in Table 5.2 and lead to the introduction of a new arrow in Figure 5.1, dashed to in- dicate that it occurs outside the confines of personality proper.
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New Cross-Cultural Evidence for FFT
FFT was formulated to organize and explain a body of findings; in particular, it was in- tended to provide an explanation for the remarkable stability of personality that lon- gitudinal studies had revealed. How was it possible that years of experience, marriage, divorce, career changes, chronic and acute illnesses, wars and depressions, and count- less hours of television viewing could have so little impact on personality traits? Combined with emerging findings on the heritability of personality traits and the general lack of evi- dence for common environmental influences on personality (Plomin & Daniels, 1987), these findings suggested to us that traits are categorically distinct from learned behaviors and beliefs, which certainly do change with age and which certainly are shaped by child- hood experiences. FFT is really an elabora- tion of this basic insight, formulated in the early 1990s. Ideally, theories go beyond a post hoc in- terpretation of observations and lead to test- able hypotheses. Perhaps the most compel- ling tests of FFT have been the cross-cultural studies on the FFM that have been conducted in the past decade. Researchers around the world began to translate the NEO-PI-R (to date, into more than 40 languages) and con- duct research in their own cultures. There was, of course, no guarantee that the instru- ment would be translatable or that the in- tended factors would be replicated in differ- ent cultures. Indeed, one skeptic wrote that “different cultures and different languages should give rise to other models that have lit- tle chance of being five in number nor of hav- ing any of the factors resemble those derived from the linguistic/social network of middle- class Americans” (Juni, 1996, p. 864). That was a reasonable view if one as- sumed that culture dictates personality, as generations of anthropologists and personal- ity psychologists had done. But the implica- tions of FFT are clear: Personality traits are a function of biology, and all human being share a common genome. Therefore, the structure of personality ought to be universal. Lexical studies, in which the personality traits encoded in natural languages are ana- lyzed, have now been conducted in a number of cultures. Many of them do show the FFM seen in American lexical studies (e.g., Somer
& Goldberg, 1999), but the case is less clear in other cultures (Saucier, Hampson, & Goldberg, 2000), and some researchers, as noted earlier, discern a common six-factor model (Ashton, Lee, Perugini, et al., 2004). Historically, lexical studies played a crucial role in the identification of the FFM, but it must be recalled that they are studies of per- sonality language and only indirectly of per- sonality itself. The lexical hypothesis asserts that all socially significant traits will be en- coded in language, but that hypothesis may be too strong. There are, after all, languages in which the only color words are dark and light (see Kay, Berlin, Maffi, & Merrifield, 1997), but this does not mean that the speak- ers are color-blind. An appropriate test of the universal- ity of structure would need to use the same variables in each culture, and translations of a standard personality inventory provide such variables. Evidence for the universality of the FFM is clear across different instru- ments (McCrae & Costa, 1997b; Paunon- en et al., 1996) and different methods of measurement. A large-scale observer rating study showed factor replications in 50 dif- ferent cultures (McCrae, Terracciano, et al., 2005a). The traits of the FFM exist and are similarly related in all cultures so far studied. This does not preclude the possibility that there are other, indigenous personality fac- tors unique to particular cultures, although such factors would probably be interpretable as characteristic adaptations within FFT. Postulate 1c claims that the development of traits is guided by intrinsic maturation, and thus development too should be species- wide. There are few longitudinal studies out- side Western cultures, and normally cross- sectional studies are difficult to interpret, because age differences at any given time may reflect cohort effects—that is, influenc- es of the particular time and place in which people’s personalities developed. Education levels, for example, decline cross-sectionally, not because people become less educated with age, but because education has become more widespread in more recent times. But according to FFT, early life experi- ence should not matter, because experience does not shape personality traits. Trait de- velopment in the People’s Republic of China should parallel development in the United States, despite the different experiences
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cally from narrow and specific to broad and general dispositions; Neuroticism, Extraver- sion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness constitute the highest level of the hierarchy.” This is the only pos- tulate in which the FFM is even mentioned; otherwise the theory could just as well be ad- opted by proponents of a three- or seven- or N -factor model. And Postulate 1d does not offer to ex- plain the FFM, it merely asserts it. Shouldn’t a five-factor theory explain why there are five factors and not six? And why these factors and not others? That would be an impressive feat, but it is not essential to scientific under- standing. The speed of light is crucial to the theory of special relativity, but that theory gives no clue as to why c ≈ 300,000 km/sec. Postulate 1d reflects the position of Mc- Crae and John (1992), who explained the recurrent finding of five robust factors by saying “we believe it is an empirical fact, like the fact that there are seven continents or eight American presidents from Virginia” (p. 194). McCrae and John were not trying to make a dogmatic pronouncement about the true number of factors (although the quote seems sometimes to have been inter- preted that way; see, e.g., Block, 1995). In- stead, they hoped to offer an alternative to the seductive but ultimately unpersuasive no- tion that the number somehow reflected the information- processing capacities of human raters (Goldberg, 1983; Miller, 1956). There is nothing magic about the number 5 ; it is simply what the data seem to show. Without further rationale, Postulate 1d is vulnerable to empirical falsification. The continent of Atlantis may rise again from the sea, a ninth Virginian may be elected presi- dent, and trait researchers may discover an- other factor or factors of personality of com- parable scope to N, E, O, A, and C. At that point it will be time to modify FFT. Although they could not explain the number 8 , histo- rians could certainly give some reasons why natives of Virginia were disproportionately chosen as U.S. presidents, and could give very specific reasons for the selection of Washing- ton, Jefferson, and Madison. Can personal- ity psychologists explain why people differ in levels of N, E, O, A, or C? Given that personality traits have a bio- logical basis and that human beings are the products of evolution, it is natural to seek answers in evolutionary psychology. Buss
(1996; see also Chapter 2, this volume) made a strong case for the relevance of personality traits to social adaptation. People with dif- ferent personality traits go about the tasks of survival and reproduction in different ways. For example, to retain their mates, extraverts show off, agreeable men express affection, and men low in C try to make their mates jealous. Personality traits influence the abili- ty to make strategic alliances and to compete with others for resources. Personality traits, and specifically the five major factors, are of central relevance to the tasks people have evolved to solve. Because of this, people have learned to attend to individual differences in personality, and to base their choices of lead- ers, friends, and mates partly on inferred per- sonality characteristics. This perspective does not, in itself, ex- plain the evolution of the FFM, however. Normally natural and sexual selection are invoked to explain a species-wide charac- teristic, not variation within the species. A number of evolutionary approaches have been taken to explain individual differences, and Figueredo and colleagues (2005) review them and the slim evidence that currently can be used to evaluate them. Tooby and Cosmides (1990) offered what must be considered the null position: Traits exist because they are adaptively neu- tral; they are perpetuated as genetic noise. This is a valuable fall-back position for traits such as Openness to Aesthetics that are of dubious adaptive value (see also Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998). A step higher are models that claim that traits are the result of stabilizing selec- tion (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001)—that is, that extreme values may have been selected out. (This position is consistent with views of personality disorder that identify pathology with extreme scores.) Individuals who were too introverted to find a mate or too extra- verted to conceal themselves from an enemy may not have survived and reproduced. But variation within the normal range may be of no evolutionary consequence. MacDonald (1998) takes a more sub- stantive position, arguing that the five fac- tors represent evolved mechanisms for solving social and nonsocial problems. For example, he links Extraversion to a behav- ioral approach system “designed to motivate organisms to approach sources of reward” (p. 125). Individual differences in such adap-
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tive traits are incidental and explainable by noting that there are alternative viable strate- gies associated with different levels of traits. Agreeableness makes it easier to acquire al- lies, but antagonism sharpens one’s ability to compete with enemies; open exploration leads to new resources, but closed conven- tionality exploits the tried-and-true. Figueredo and King (2001) offer a more formal explanation for individual differ- ences. They agree that traits are adaptive but invoke the notion of frequency-dependent selection to account for individual differenc- es. Agreeableness is usually adaptive, leading to cooperation and shared resources. But if a group consists chiefly of highly agreeable individuals, the occasional antagonist can prosper by taking advantage of them. If an- tagonists proliferate, however, their competi- tion will lower the adaptive value of being antagonistic. Individual differences in an evolving population thus sustain a dynamic equilibrium. Such theorizing illustrates the ways in which evolutionary thinking might account for the factors of the FFM, but no compelling case has yet been made. Ideally, we would be- gin with basic principles of evolution, such as parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and deception strategies (see Hendrick, 2005), and deduce the existence and nature of the five factors—but that seems unlikely to hap- pen. As Buss (1991) acknowledged, “general evolutionary theory broadly outlines what is unlikely to have evolved... [but] it can rarely specify what must have evolved” (p. 465). One complication in formulating evo- lutionary hypotheses is that we do not yet know to which evolutionary era they must be pegged. Buss (1991) sought to analyze per- sonality by identifying “ adaptive problems confronted by ancestral human populations ” (p. 476; original emphasis), but evidence shows that the FFM can also be glimpsed in chimpanzees (King, Weiss, & Farmer, 2005). This finding suggests that precursors of these personality factors may have evolved in an- cestors common to some or all primates. In- deed, for all we know, Extraversion evolved when fish first formed schools. Identifying the relevant adaptive problems may require much more data from comparative personal- ity psychology. Another problem concerns the adap- tive core of each factor. MacDonald (1998) identifies Extraversion with excitement seek-
ing and reward sensitivity; Ashton and Lee (2001) more narrowly focus on “behaviours that tend to attract social attention” (p. 342). Other theorists might emphasize the element of dominance in Extraversion and seek an explanation based on adaptive variations in dominance versus submission. MacDonald cautions that “there is no reason to suppose that the dimensions revealed by factor analy- sis map in a 1:1 manner with biological ad- aptations” (p. 127), which, if true, effectively undermines the search for evolutionary ex- planations for the factors in the FFM. Nevertheless, Figueredo and colleagues (2005) concluded that there is “a modicum of evidence supporting each of the major evolu- tionary theories explaining... individual dif- ferences” (p. 873). The problem of defining the adaptive core of each factor might be ob- viated by proposing theories on the evolution of facet-level traits, which are more narrowly defined. And it must be recalled that differ- ent evolutionary explanations may apply to different traits. Openness to Aesthetics may be a matter of genetic noise; Depression may reflect stabilizing selection; Compliance may result from frequency-dependent selection. Evolutionary explanation, like evolution it- self, may be a convoluted process.
Subtheories of the Five Factors
The postulates of FFT deal uniformly with all five factors and thus must offer quite gen- eral propositions. It would be entirely possi- ble to construct more specific subtheories to deal with each of the five factors separately. Conceptual analyses of the individual factors have been offered in several articles (Costa & McCrae, 1998a; Costa, McCrae, & Dem- broski, 1989; McCrae & Costa, 1997a; Wat- son & Clark, 1997); formal theorizing could be guided by Figure 5.1. The agenda might be as follows:
- Define the basic tendencies involved for the factor and its defining facet traits.
- Identify specific biological bases, from genes to brain structures and functions.
- Identify dynamic processes, such as de- fenses, cognitive styles, or planning and scheduling, that are differentially affected by the factor (see Postulate 6b).
- Catalogue the characteristic adaptations— interests, roles, skills, self-image, psychi- atric symptoms—associated with the fac-
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of investigation and their own explanations. This stance was apparently motivated by the fear that higher levels of personality might be reduced to mere expressions of traits. In 2002, Hooker began to link McAd- ams’s levels to each other and to dynamic processes, and soon McAdams had endorsed this revision (Hooker & McAdams, 2003). The major innovation was the pairing of levels with processes: For example, traits were paired with states (phenomena that FFT would class not as processes but as out- comes—the subjective side of the objective biography). Most recently, McAdams and Pals (2006) have offered a new formulation, based not on components of a personality system, but on five principles that relate and set in context the three Levels, now called “dispositional traits,” “characteristic adap- tations,” and “integrative life narratives.” In place of biological bases, McAdams and Pals put “evolved human nature,” and in place of external influences they specify “culture,” plus a residual box of the “social ecology of everyday life.” The objective biography is what is to be explained, so it is not identified as a separate principle, but the arrow joining characteristic adaptations and social ecology is labeled “most daily behavior.” Perhaps the most important difference between McAdams and Pals’s (2006) model and that in Figure 5.1 is that most of their arrows are two-headed, suggesting recipro- cal influence. Even that aspect is not quite as different as it appears. They acknowledge that culture’s effects on traits may be limited, but argue that “culture does provide demand characteristics and display rules for the be- havioral expression of traits” (p. 211), and it is this feature that accounts for the arrow from culture to dispositional traits. Yet that interpretation is entirely consistent with FFT, which regards trait expression as a function of culturally conditioned characteristic adap- tations. Sheldon (2004) offered an ambitious syn- thesis of contemporary research in the social and biological sciences, combined with pre- scriptions for optimizing human functioning. At the level of personality, situated between the brain and culture, four levels are identi- fied: organismic characteristics, personality traits, goals and intentions, and selves and life stories. Sheldon’s chief criticism of FFT is that it is reductionistic, apparently granting primacy to basic tendencies instead of postu-
lating the reciprocal influences among levels that Sheldon favors. FFT acknowledges that some charac- teristic adaptations are maladaptive but says nothing about why; it is a very meager theory of psychopathology and says nothing about positive mental health (but see Mc- Crae, Löckenhoff, & Costa, 2005, for an elaboration of personality psychopathology based on FFT). By contrast, Sheldon hopes to offer a comprehensive theory of optimal human being. His intention is to articulate general principles that reflect what is known about human nature, such as “Satisfy your basic bodily needs,” “Try to develop more positive personality traits,” “Set and pursue goals, as effectively as possible,” and “Adapt to one’s culture’s norms and prescriptions” (pp. 184–185). Stated so baldly, these may seem mere platitudes, but they do offer a sys- tematic survey of what may be considered desirable at many of the levels identified in this new generation of personality theories, and they are worth serious consideration by anyone concerned with positive psychology.
fft and tHe IndIvIdual
Although it is doubtless true that every per- son is, in some respects, like no other per- son (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1953), FFT (like most personality theories) has nothing to say about this aspect of the person. It is, from a trait perspective, error variance. However, this most emphatically does not mean that personality is irrelevant to understanding the individual. In the typical application in clinical or personnel psychology, the individual case is understood by inferring personality traits from one set of indicators and using the re- sulting personality profile to interpret a life history or predict future adjustment. This is not circular reasoning, because if valid per- sonality measures are used, the traits identi- fied carry surplus meaning that allows the in- terpreter to go beyond the information given (McCrae & Costa, 1995b). If respondents tell us that they are cheerful and high-spirited, we detect Extraversion and can guess with better-than-chance accuracy that they will be interested in managerial and sales positions. However, it would be much harder to predict their current occupation: Just as the theory of evolution is better at explaining how ex-
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isting species function than it is at predict- ing which species will evolve, so personality profiles are more useful in understanding a life than in making specific predictions about what a person will do. This is not a limita- tion of FFT; it is an intrinsic feature of com- plex and chaotic systems. Postulate 3a, multiple determination, points out that there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between characteristic adap- tations and behaviors; the same is, of course, equally true for the traits that underlie char- acteristic adaptations. Consequently, inter- preting individual behaviors even when the personality profile is well known is a some- what speculative art. Consider the case of Horatio, Lord Nelson (Costa & McCrae, 1998a; Southey, 1813/1922). In the course of his campaigns against Napoleon’s France, he spent many months defending the woefully corrupt court of Naples against a democratic insurrection that had been encouraged by the French. Why would so heroic a figure take on so shabby a task? We know from a lifetime of instances that Nelson was a paragon of dutifulness, and we might suspect that he was simply fol- lowing orders—certainly he would have ra- tionalized his conduct as devotion to the war against France. But we also know that Nel- son was fiercely independent in his views of what constituted his duty: “I always act as I feel right, without regard to custom” (South- ey, 1813/1922, p. 94). He might equally well have supported the insurrection and won its allegiance to the English cause. We should also consider another trait Nelson possessed: He was excessively low in modesty. Great as his naval achievements were, he never failed to remind people of them. His sympathies were thus with the ar- istocracy, and he was flattered by the court of Naples, which ultimately named him Duke Di Bronte. Together, diligence (C), indepen- dence (O), and vanity (low A) go far to ex- plain this episode of behavior. To be sure, there are other factors, in- cluding Nelson’s relationship to the English ambassador’s wife, Lady Hamilton (Simp- son, 1983). That notorious affair itself re- flects Nelson’s independence and vanity but seems strikingly incongruent with his dutiful- ness. At the level of the individual, the opera- tions of personality traits are complex and often inconsistent (a phenomenon Mischel & Shoda, 1995, have tried to explain).
The Subjective Experience of Personality
A number of writers (e.g., Hogan, 1996) have suggested that the FFM does not ac- curately represent personality as it is subjec- tively experienced by the individual. Daniel Levinson dismissed the whole enterprise of trait psychology as a concern for trivial and peripheral aspects of the person (Rubin, 1981). McAdams (1996) has referred to it as the “psychology of the stranger,” because standing on the five factors is the sort of thing one would want to know about a stranger to whom one has just been introduced. Ozer (1996) claimed that traits are personality as seen from the standpoint of the other, not the self. We believe this last position represents a slight confusion. Individuals, who have ac- cess to their own private thoughts, feelings, and desires, and who generally have a more extensive knowledge of their own history of behavior, have a quite different perspective on their own traits than do external observ- ers. What they nonetheless share with others is the need to infer the nature of their own traits and to express their inference in the comparative language of traits. We have no direct intuition of our trait profile; we can only guess at it from its manifestations in our actions and experience. (One possible reason for the increasing stability of personality as assessed by self-reports from ages 12 to 30—see McCrae et al., 2002; Siegler et al., 1990—is that we continue to learn about ourselves in this time period.) The fact that traits must be inferred does not, however, mean that they are or seem foreign. When adults were asked to give 20 different answers to the question “Who am I?”, about a quarter of the responses were worded as personality traits, and many oth- ers combined trait and role characteristics (e.g., “a loving mother”). Traits seem to form an important component of the spontaneous self-concept (McCrae & Costa, 1988); even children use trait terms to describe them- selves (Donahue, 1994). Sheldon, Ryan, Rawsthorne, and Ilardi (1997) brought a humanistic perspective to this issue by assessing sense of authenticity in individuals as they occupied different social roles. They also asked for context-specific self-reports of personality (e.g., how extra- verted respondents were as students and as romantic partners). They found that indi-
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