Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

and W. Jones, eds., Advances in Personal Relationships, vol. 4. London: Jessica Kingsley.

MARIO MIKULINCER

PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

See Interpersonal Power; Symbolic

Interaction Theory.

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Three questions underlie the study of social structure and personality: What is social structure? What is personality? And, what is the relationship between the two? The history of this area and the current state of knowledge contain tremendous variability in the answers to these questions.

For example, social structure includes whole cultural configurations, social institutions such as family and the state, social stratification and class, the nature of roles, organizational structures, group dynamics, and micro-features of day-to-day interactions. Social structure also includes process and change at the group level, such as economic de- pression-recession, modernization, revolution, war, organizational growth and decline, human development and aging, and life-course transitions (school-to-work, retirement).

Concepts and approaches to personality also have a rich history in this area, with many variations. These include attitudes, abilities, affective and attributional styles, values, beliefs, cognitive schema, identities, aspirations, views of the self and others, and individual behaviors. The concept of personality, too, connotes both structure and process or change. Most contemporary observers would agree with a definition of personality as ‘‘regularities and consistencies in the behavior of individuals in their lives’’ (Snyder and Ickes 1985, p. 883). In some approaches, attitude and the self precede and determine behavior; in other approaches, people observe behavior and infer their own mental states and features of self.

Neither a simple answer nor close consensus exists among scholars on the nature of the relationship between social structure and personality, although most would agree that the relationship is

reciprocal rather than asymmetric, and modest rather than extremely strong or extremely weak (House and Mortimer 1990; Miller-Loessi 1995; Mortimer and Lorence 1995). That is, multiple areas of research provide clear evidence that variations in social structures shape components of personality, and that variations in personality in turn affect social structure. Humans are not completely pawns in the face of social forces, nor are they entirely independent, autonomous agents, unfettered by social influences. The study of human lives shows clear evidence of both forms.

The study of social structure and personality has its roots in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Scholars whose ideas and research offer inspiration include Marx (1963), Freud (1928), Mead (1934), Lewin (1951), Gerth and Mills (1953), Inkeles and Levinson (1954), Smelser and Smelser (1963), and Turner (1956).

The focus of scholarship in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s was to define the basic concepts and processes for personality, for social structure, and for the relationship between the two. This era produced and elaborated developments such as field theory, role theory, and interactionist perspectives on the self, along with concepts such as self, significant other, role taking, socialization, the authoritarian personality, modal personality, and national character.

In the 1950s, the sociological research on social structure and personality focused on macroscopic empirical studies of national character: What was national character? How did it vary? Could it be defined in terms of modal personality types? A long tradition of comparative anthropological studies of culture and personality informed these studies. For example, some of these studies considered the relationship between social class and personality, with social class defined as white-collar–blue- collar. Personality referred to some underlying continuum of ‘‘adjustment,’’ and the link between social class and personality occurred in socialization, in particular in child-rearing practices.

The 1960s produced major changes in the study of personality and social structure. First, the quantity of research increased significantly, concurrently with the massive growth of sociology and psychology as disciplines and with the growth of higher education. Second, research in the area

became more diffuse and more differentiated. What had been a fairly identifiable area of research scattered to subareas of scientific disciplines, such as the sociology of medicine, social stratification, small group dynamics, or attitudebehavior research. The research problems multiplied; research methods and strategies multiplied; theories and explanations multiplied; and journal outlets and books multiplied. At the same time, communication, integration, and cross-fertilization across the research fragments declined, although in recent years this may be changing. In short, during this era ‘‘social structure and personality’’ became an umbrella description for many different lines of investigation that were only loosely connected.

The third major change in the 1960s was a refocusing of research on social structure and personality, one that continues into the 1990s. The empirical macroscopic studies of national character, and the emphasis on holistic conceptions of culture and national character, declined. On the sociological side, the emphasis shifted to studying ‘‘aspects of societies in relation to aspects of individuals’’ (House 1981, p. 526). On the psychological side, a looser, multidimensional approach to personality replaced the earlier Freudian approach, which was based on a coherent dynamic system and on personality types and structures (DiRenzo 1977).

House (1981) describes this major refocusing of research in terms of three principles, which also define ideals for the investigation of personality and social structure. First, the components principle suggests that social structures such as roles, positions, and systems are multidimensional, and theory should specify which dimensions are important for which personality phenomena (such as stress, self-esteem, and locus of control). Second, the proximity principle suggests focusing first on understanding the more proximate stimuli that affect people and then mapping the causal patterns across broader levels of social structure in time and space. Third, the psychological principle identifies the importance of specifying the psychological processes involved when social structures and processes affect the self, personality, and attitudes. House’s three principles nicely summarize many of the recent advances in the study of social structure and personality. They also define the nature

of limitations in current knowledge, and identify research frontiers.

The contemporary landscape of research on social structure and personality in sociology is a patchwork of problems and areas. These include social stratification, work, and personality (Kohn et al. 1983); social structure and health, both physical and psychological (Mirowsky and Ross 1986); disjunctive social changes (war, economic depression) and individual adjustment (Elder 1974); role transitions and psychological changes (O’Brien 1986); variations in self-concept by structural position (Gecas and Burke 1995); human development, aging, and social change (Featherman and Lerner 1985; Alwin et al. 1991); and political and discriminatory attitudes, social institutions, and change (Kiecolt 1988), to mention just a few.

One of the most substantial and important areas of research involves the study of social stratification, work and personality, and the program of research of Kohn, Schooler, and colleagues (1983; Kohn and Slomczynski 1990; Kohn et al. 1997). The Kohn-Schooler model reflects the dominant approach in this particular area, and illustrates the major sociological approach to the study of social structure and personality. Spenner (1988a, 1988b, 1998) provides detailed review of this research. In comparison, approaches in psychology are more microscopic—in focusing on shorter intervals of time and smaller arenas of social space—and more likely to rely on experiments and lab studies, or field research versus large-scale survey research of people’s work lives and personality histories.

The Kohn-Schooler model begins with dimensions of jobs that are defined and measured as objectively as possible (versus subjective dimensions and measures of individual’s jobs). These structural imperatives of jobs include: occupational self-direction (substantive complexity of work, closeness of supervision, and routinization); job pressures (time pressure, heaviness, dirtiness, and hours worked per week); extrinsic risks and rewards (the probability of being held responsible for things outside one’s control, the risk of losing one’s job or business, job protections, and job income); and organizational location (ownership, bureaucratization, and hierarchical position). The three basic dimensions of personality in this research include intellectual flexibility, self-directedness of orientation, and sense of well-being or distress.

Among the subdimensions of these organizing dimensions are authoritarian conservatism, personally responsible standards of morality, trustfulness, self-confidence, self-deprecation, fatalism, anxiety, and idea conformity.

The type of analysis used in the Kohn-School- er research estimates the lagged and contemporaneous reciprocal relationships between conditions of work and dimensions of personality in nonexperimental, panel, survey data. The major data come from a national sample of over 3,000 persons, representative of the male, full-time labor force, age 16 and over in 1974. About one-third of these men were reinterviewed about ten years later, with measures being taken of work conditions and personality at both points in time. Most of the studies of women in this tradition refer to wives of men in the sample. In a series of structural equation model analyses that adjust for measurement error in dimensions of jobs and personality, the authors document an intricate pattern of lagged (over time) and contemporaneous selection and socialization effects. Selection effects refers to the effects of personality on work and social structure; socialization effects refers to the effects of work (social structure) on self and personality. Most of the effects of personality on work are lagged, as workers appear to select jobs of a given type depending on measured aspects of their personality, or to slowly mold jobs to match their personalities. Conversely, the effects of jobs on personalities appear to be somewhat larger and to involve both contemporaneous and lagged effects. The largest relationships center on components of occupational self-direction, in particular, on substantive complexity of work. For example, substantive complexity of work environments increases intellectual flexibility for men by an amount that is onefourth as great as the effect of intellectual flexibility a decade earlier, net of controls for other variables and confounding influences.

Kohn, Schooler, and colleagues interpret their findings with a ‘‘learning-generalization’’ explanation. In it, people learn from their jobs and generalize the lessons to spheres of their lives away from the job. Rather than using alternate psychological mechanisms such as displacement or compensation, the structural imperatives of jobs affect a worker’s values; orientations to self, children, and society; and cognitive functioning. They do this

primarily through a direct process of learning from the job and generalization of what has been learned to off-job realities. The collected research shows that these generalizations appear to hold under a broad range of controls for spuriousness, alternate explanations, and extensions. The extensions include men’s and women’s work lives, selfdirection in leisure activities, housework, and educational domains, as well as a number of replications of the basic model including careful comparisons with samples from Poland and Japan, and more recently from the Ukraine (Kohn et al. 1997).

Similar summaries exist for many other areas of research in social structure and personality, but this line of research has been one of the most important. The limitations of the Kohn-Schooler program of research illustrate some of the frontiers facing research on work and personality. First, are these conditions of work the most important dimensions of social structure? Do they combine and exert their effects in a more complicated recipe? Are there other features of context that should be considered? Second, are these the appropriate dimensions and combinations or personality? Are there left-out dimensions or other larger metaor organizing dimensions of personality, such as flexibility-rigidity or general affectivity (Spenner 1988a) or processual dimensions of personality, that might be more important?

Third, there are many alternate explanations that replace or extend the learning-generalization explanation for how jobs and personality reciprocally relate (for review, see O’Brien 1986). They include: (1) fit hypotheses, in which the quality of the match between dimensions of personality and dimensions of social structure determines the effects of the person on the job and vice versa; (2) needs and expectancy explanations, in which additional layers of cognitive weighting, interpretation, and processing mediate the relationships among job attributes, personality dimensions, and work attitude outcomes; (3) buffering and mediational hypotheses, in which the effects of social structure on personality (or vice versa) are accentuated or damped for certain extreme combinations of work conditions, or outside influences such as social support buffer the effects of social structure on personality; and (4) social information processing and attributional explanations, which posit additional perceptual or judgmental, evaluational or

choice, or attributional processes that affect jobattitude and attitude-behavior linkages.

At more microscopic levels (shorter time intervals such as seconds or minutes, and smaller domains of social space, such as intrapsychic, or face-to-face interactions) the challenge for research on social structure and personality is to discover the meanings and processes that underlie longerterm, larger-scale correlations between the two. This challenge applies not only to how job or social structure affects personality, but also to how a domain of personality selects a worker into an occupational or another role, or serves as a catalyst for human agency and leads to attempts by people to modify their roles and circumstances. For example, if learning generalization operates as hypothesized, what does that mean? Is the learning part of the process as straightforward as textbook images of reinforcement psychology and social learning theory imply it is? Survey research designs, the dominant methodology, typically assume and rarely observe, specify, or test the social-psychological and psychological concomitants of learning generalization. What are the associated perceptual, affective, cognitive, and behavioral concomitants of learning generalization? What are the supporting and disconfirming attribution patterns and mediations? Or is the learning process below the level of cognitive operations and attributuional web of inferences that people use to make sense of their world? Experimental and observational design may be more informative than the typical survey research approach. The field understands many of the ingredients but not the specific recipe.

At a mezzoscopic level—careers, the human life span, organizations, and other institutional settings and mechanisms—the challenge to research on social structure and personality is to put the snapshots of relationships in motion and understand the dynamics over longer periods of time. For example, in the Kohn-Schooler model, how are its findings nested in adult development, and how is adult development affected by the dynamics implied in this model? Age and developmental variations have received only limited attention in the Kohn-Schooler approach. Further, much of our knowledge about relationships between various social structures and personality assumes a system in equilibrium (for example, a single coefficient capturing an effect over five or ten years). We know much less about the dynamics of social

structure–personality relationships, including estimation of trajectories, threshold effects, and rates of change. Here too, different types of research and data designs will be required to advance the state of knowledge.

Finally, at a larger, macroscopic level—en- compassing decades and centuries, and whole institutional spheres and societies—the challenges confronting research in social structure and personality are multiple. They include discovering the larger sociohistorical, psychological, and biological contexts and processes in which social struc- ture–personality relationships are embedded, and then mapping and tracing the lines of influence across levels. For example, many research streams are exclusively national or subnational, in terms of generalizations . The Kohn-Schooler approach, with systematic studies in the United States, Poland, Japan, and the Ukraine, is a notable exception, but even here we are still early on in understanding how the models vary in comparative studies of national and subnational contexts. Further, the state of knowledge is young in our understanding of how historical variations in the content and composition of work, the labor process, and the family, or in organizational form and practice altered relationships between social structure and personality. This larger challenge also includes discovering how long-term variations in human personality feed back on long-term variations in social structures, shaping history and defining what is possible for the evolution of social forms and processes.

REFERENCES

Alwin, D. F., R. L. Cohen, and T. M. Newcomb 1991

Aging, Personality and Social Change: Attitude Persistence and Change over the Life-Span. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

DiRenzo, Gordon J. 1977 ‘‘Socialization, Personality and Social Systems.’’ In A. Inkeles, J. Coleman, and N. Smelser, eds., Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 3. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews.

Elder, Glen H., Jr. 1974 Children of the Great Depression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Featherman, David L., and Richard M. Lerner 1985 ‘‘Ontogeneses and Sociogenesis: Problematics for Theory and Research about Development and Socialization across the Life-Span.’’ American Sociological Review 50:659–676.

Freud, Sigmund 1928 The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Random House.

Gecas, Victor, and Peter Burke 1995 ‘‘Self and Identity.’’ In K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House, eds.,

Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills 1953 Character and Social Structure. New York: Harcourt.

House, James S. 1981 ‘‘Social Structure and Personality.’’ In M. Rosenberg and R. H. Turner, eds., Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Basic Books.

———, and Jeylan T. Mortimer 1990 ‘‘Social Structure and the Individual: Emerging Themes and New Directions.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 53:71–80.

Inkeles, Alex, and Daniel Levinson 1954 ‘‘National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Social Systems.’’ In G. Lindzey, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Kiecolt, K. Jill 1988. ‘‘Recent Developments in Attitudes and Social Structure.’’ In W. R. Scott, and J. Blake, eds., Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 14. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews.

Kohn, Melvin L., and Carmie Schooler, with the collaboration of J. Miller, K. Miller, C. Schoenbach, and R. Schoenberg 1983 Work and Personality: An Inquiry into the Impact of Social Stratification. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

Kohn, Melvin L., and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski 1990

Social Structure and Self-Direction: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Poland. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell.

———, Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, Krystyna Janicka, Valeri Khmelko, Bogdan W. Mach, Vladimir Paniotto, Wojciech Zaborowski, Roberto Gutierrez, and Cory Heyman 1997 ‘‘Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Radical Social Change: A Comparative Analysis of Poland and Ukraine.’’ American Sociological Review 62:614–638.

Lewin, Kurt 1951 Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper.

Marx, Karl 1963 Karl Marx: Early Writings. Edited and translated by T. B. Bottomore. New York: Mc- Graw-Hill.

Mead, George H. 1934 Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller-Loessi, Karen 1995 ‘‘Comparative Social Psychology: Cross-Cultural and CrossNational.’’ In K. S.

Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

Mirowsky, John, and Catherine E. Ross 1986 ‘‘Social Patterns of Distress.’’ In R. Turner and J. Short, eds., Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 12. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews.

Mortimer, Jeylan, and John Lorence 1995 ‘‘Social Psychology of Work.’’ In K. S. Cook, G. A. Fine, and J. S. House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

O’Brien, Gordon E. 1986 Psychology of Work and Unemployment. New York: Wiley.

Smelser, Neil J., and William T. Smelser 1963 Personality and Social Systems. New York: Wiley.

Snyder, Mark, and William Ickes 1985 ‘‘Personality and Social Behavior.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology, Special Fields and Applications, vol. II. New York: Random House.

Spenner, Kenneth I. 1988a ‘‘Social Stratification, Work and Personality.’’ In W. R. Scott and J. Blake, eds.,

Annual Review of Sociology, vol 14. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews.

———1988b ‘‘Occupations, Work Settings and the Course of Adult Development: Tracing the Implications of Select Historical Changes.’’ In P. B. Baltes, D. L. Featherman, and R. M. Lerner, eds., Life-Span Development and Behavior, vol. 9. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

———1998 ‘‘Reflections on a 30-Year Career of Research on Work and Personality by Melvin Kohn and Colleagues.’’ Sociological Forum 13:169–181.

Turner, Ralph. H. 1956 ‘‘Role-taking, Role Standpoint, and Reference Group Behavior.’’ American Journal of Sociology 61:316–328.

KENNETH I. SPENNER

PERSONALITY

MEASUREMENT

WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

‘‘Personality’’ is an ambiguous term derived from the natural language, and not necessarily a scientific concept. Consensus among interested scientists as to its precise meaning has been fairly modest. One major cleavage is between views of personality as core dynamic processes inherent in all people

and views that emphasize characteristics on which individuals differ. Because the second sort of view defines personality in a way as to make it far more conducive to measurement, this article focuses on personality as certain potentially measurable characteristics of individuals.

Which measurable characteristics? There are many kinds of characteristics, and useful ways of categorizing characteristics have been developed (Norman 1967; Angleitner et al. 1990). Characteristics that fall into many of the categories do not fit common definitions of personality. Descriptors of physical characteristics (e.g., short, muscular) lack sufficient reference to psychological (behavioral, affective, cognitive) features. Descriptors invoking social roles (e.g., motherly, professional) and social effects (e.g., famous, neglected) involve socialcontextualization and relativization too heavily to give inferences about an individual’s personality attributes. Descriptors of emotions (e.g., elated, afraid) and many motivational and intentional states (e.g., hungry, reluctant, inspired) are too prone to reference relatively transient characteristics. And some descriptors (e.g., awful, impressive) are so purely evaluative that they provide insufficient specificity with respect to psychological features.

Among descriptors that refer to presumably more internal and enduring psychological attributes, three categories stand out. Abilities or talents (e.g., skillful, creative, athletic) refer to maximum rather than typical levels of performance on tasks. Beliefs and attitudes (e.g., religious, racist, environmentalist) concern affectively tinged habits of mind pertaining to specific objects and concepts. Although personality models have frequently contained some abilityand attitude-related content, at their core are traits (e.g., daring, patient) that are more directly related to typical behavioral patterns. Because they are expressed behaviorally, enduring motivational patterns (e.g., need for achievement) might also be easily fit within definitions of personality that emphasize typical behavior patterns. ‘‘Temperament’’ usually denotes the more clearly inborn and genetically derived aspects of personality, whereas ‘‘character’’ is often used to denote acquired moral qualities. But these terms are otherwise synonymous with personality, which can be defined as consistencies in patterns of behavior—where behavior is

defined broadly to include affect, cognition, and motivation—on which individuals differ. Overall, personality is a lay concept of sufficient importance and usefulness to have been taken up and refined by scientists.

In natural languages, personality descriptors are alternately represented as adjectives (e.g., adventurous), attribute nouns (e.g., adventurousness), or type nouns (e.g., adventurer). Because adjectives differentiate properties, personality adjectives are inherently central to personality description, although some languages lack an adjective class and carry on this adjective function in other ways (Dixon 1977). Psychologists move easily between adjectives and attribute-noun characterizations of the same trait (as with extraverted and extraversion): Either form suggests properties that exist in varying degrees. Type-noun characterizations, in contrast, imply a categorization—one either is an extravert or one is not—which in turn suggests the assumption of a bimodal frequency distribution of individuals on the trait. Such bimodal distributions appear to be rare. Although typenoun characterizations of personality traits have great popular appeal, their use by academic psychologists has become quite limited. There has been a search for categorical taxons underlying the traits related to certain mental disorders (e.g., Meehl 1995), but this task is not easy. Recent correlational studies indicate that symptoms of mental disorders, and of personality disorders in particular, are continuously distributed in the population, and have substantial overlap with measures of various personality traits (Costa and Widiger 1994).

In the last three decades, many psychologists have addressed the fundamental issue of whether personality traits are real, or whether they exist only in the eye of the beholder. Mischel’s early review (1968) suggested that personality measures were at best modest predictors of relevant actual behaviors. However, a consensus has emerged that when criterion behaviors are aggregated, across time or across situations, personality measures can become quite highly predictive (Kenrick and Funder 1988). This follows, of course, from definitions of personality offered above: Personality does not denote single behaviors but rather consistent patterns in multiple behaviors. Moreover, studies involving twins and adoptees have repeatedly indicated that personality-trait scores are partially (as much as 50 percent) heritable, implying biological

underpinnings. Such behavior-genetic findings have stimulated the development of models that set forth biological explanations for personality variation, attempting to delineate phenotypic constructs so that they correspond directly to known biological mechanisms (e.g., Gray 1987; Rothbart et al. 1994; Zuckerman 1995). Nonetheless, studies with twins and adoptees also indicate that differences in experience, mainly of the type not shared by family members, have a profound effect on personality characteristics (Plomin 1990). There are also some indications of important effects of culture.

Although personality traits reflect behavioral consistencies across situations, a variety of research findings indicate that some situations facilitate expression of personality traits more than do other situations (Caspi and Moffitt 1993). Highly structured or ritualized social settings (e.g., a funeral home, a lecture hall) tend to attenuate the expression of personality differences, whereas relatively unstructured settings (e.g., a nightclub, a playground) bring out personality differences. This pattern has three important consequences for personality measurement. First, to the extent that a society’s social milieux are age-stratified, one might expect across-time continuity in apparent traits to be somewhat ‘‘heterotypic’’—leading to different surface characteristics at different ages. Second, personality characteristics are best assessed by placing the individual in a relatively unstructured situation in which responses are relatively unconstrained by social norms; therefore, the stimuli on personality measures should not have correct responses. Third, to the extent that a cultural milieu is highly structured and ritualized, one might expect to see less emphasis on personality differences than would be found in relatively individualistic cultural mileux (Miller 1984).

PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT CAPTURES

CONSISTENCIES

Measurement can be defined as a set of rules for assigning numbers to entities (such as individuals) in such a way that attributes of the entities are faithfully represented. Measurement procedures typically set up, or specify, regularized administration conditions. Thus, measurement generally involves consistency of procedure; but personality measurement has an even deeper relation to consistency.

As noted above, a consensual definition of personality would emphasize characteristics that are internally rather than externally caused, psychological rather than overtly physical, and stable and enduring rather than transient. Because of the emphasis on stable and enduring qualities, relia- bility—relative absence of measurement error—is of first importance in personality measurement. A reliable measure by definition registers characteristics that are consistent across time, as indicated by test-retest reliability coefficients or across situations. Internal consistency, or inter-item reliability, is an analogue of cross-situational stability. Each item represents a unique situation in either of two ways: (1) its referent content may refer to a distinct situation (e.g., ‘‘I talk a lot at parties’’), or (2) simply being presented with this item as distinguished from another item (e.g., ‘‘I talk very little at parties’’) is a unique immediate situation for the respondent. Reliability is most often measured either by a stability coefficient, indicating the correlation between scores at one time and those at another, or by an internal consistency coefficient (e.g., coefficient alpha) that represents the average correlation between pairs of all possible split halves of the test items, although a variety of alternative reliability models are available. Until cross-time stability is established, a trait’s stability is only presumed and it might be better termed an attribute, since the latter term has fewer implications as to stability.

Another criterion for the reliability of personality judgments is the extent to which different observers agree in rating a target. This is a more demanding criterion; ideally, to the degree an individual has a characteristic it will be obvious to both self and observers. However, a number of influences tend to attenuate agreement between observers. Some characteristics (e.g., sociability) are highly observable, whereas others (e.g., anxiety level) are less so. Interobserver agreement is typically reduced by having observed the target at different times or in different situations. Generally, we might expect the self to be the most privileged observer, but in certain ways the self-view- point can be misleading. Personality characterizations have social functions and, understandably, selfobserver agreement is prone to be affected by conscious impression management and unconscious self-enhancement tendencies (Paulhus and

Reid 1991). Finally, quite independently of content, observers differ in their use of measurement scales (e.g., differential tendencies to agree or disagree, respond extremely, or use the middle option if available). Given this minefield of potential difficulties, the moderate level of interobserver agreement documented in the research literature may be quite remarkable. It makes sense to capitalize on the conjoint perspective of multiple judges: the best arbiter of the degree to which an individual can be characterized with a certain trait may be the pooled judgments of several observers well acquainted with the subject (Hofstee 1994; Kolar et al. 1996), perhaps conjoined with self-ratings. Though greater acquaintance clearly increases judges’ accuracy, there is, particularly for the more observable traits, surprisingly good consensus among near strangers for the traits of a target (Borkenau and Liebler 1993).

Another important, but demanding, index of consistency is across-time stability: within a sample of individuals, the extent to which one’s relative standing at time 1 correlates with that at time 2. Across-time stabilities tend to be very high for short intervals (e.g., a day or a week) but diminish with greater intervals to a more moderate level. Even across long intervals, cross-time stabilities in adulthood—particularly after age 30—for most personality traits are impressively high (Costa and McCrae 1997). It appears, however, that the further the measurement intervals reach into childhood and especially infancy, the lower the stabilities become; judgments of infant temperament may not do much better than chance in predicting judgments of later adult personality. Stabilities may be held down by the incommensurability of the contexts within which infant and adult temperaments function: It is difficult to apply many adult traits (e.g., industrious, artistic, unselfish) to infants, so that any forms of continuity would have to be heterotypic. It seems likely, however, that levels of traits often do change from childhood to adulthood. Part of this change could be genetically programmed, as a different set of genes comes on-line with greater maturity, and an initial set goes off-line; on the other hand, much may change under the influence of experience. To Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘‘the child is father of the man,’’ psychometricians offer an assent beset with caveats: ‘‘usually,’’ ‘‘in many ways,’’ ‘‘with definite exceptions.’’

PERSONALITY DATA HAS MULTIPLE

SOURCES

Data on behavior patterns are most commonly elicited from self and observers or acquaintances using standardized measures of personality traits. Scores on these structured measures are compared within a sample in a ‘‘nomothetic’’ manner, that is, seeking generalizations that can be applied to all individuals. Historically, the dominant position of this structured, nomothetic approach stems from the success of well-known inventories like (1) the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is actually more of a psychiatric symptom inventory than a personality inventory;

(2) the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), which resembles the MMPI in numerous respects but taps rather different content, with scales labeled so as to stress the presence (or absence) of adaptive traits; and (3) the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a measure based on parts of C. G. Jung’s typology. The MBTI has been criticized by psychometricians, ignored by academic researchers, yet bought up by the millions in other circles. Today, these older inventories have competition from numerous new inventories that in some cases are shorter and more efficient.

Nonetheless, there are potentially useful alternatives to the questionnaire. Some embody an idiographic approach—seeking individually unique constructs that are not generalized to all peo- ple—rather than a nomothetic one. For example, in George Kelly’s Role-Construct Repertory Test, each testee nominates a set of personally significant acquaintances, then derives idiographic constructs by comparing subsets of them. Such idiographic measures undoubtedly have a unique contribution: They may generate results that are more meaningful to the individual measured. But knowledge of general laws illuminates understanding of the individual case; it is possible to adapt many nomothetic measures to serve idiographic ends. Thus, improved nomothetic understanding lays the groundwork for improved idiographic understandings.

Questionnaires, whether used nomothetically or idiographically, are essentially overt and direct in their measurement approach. A trait is assessed with reference to a person’s behaviors, emotions, and cognitions. Descriptions, which may be at a

rather broad level, are collected. This overt method can be highly efficient, but has a significant disadvantage: Because the descriptive content provides clues to what is being measured, respondents completing the measure could, if motivated, intentionally present an inaccurate picture. Moreover, responses can be provided thoughtlessly. Some of those who are dissimulating or not paying attention can be identified using so-called validity indexes. These indexes are computed by scouring the response pattern for various signs of less than honest and accurate responding: unusual levels of agreement with unfavorable items, disagreement with favorable items, denying common vices, claiming rare virtues, responding dissimilarly to items with similar content, or responding similarly to items with contradictory content.

Projective measures, in contrast, are covert measures of personality that are more resistant to dissimulating or inattentive responding. These measures assume a ‘‘projective hypothesis’’ first defined by Rorschach, Jung, and others early in this century: If an individual is presented with a vague or ambiguous stimulus, that individual’s response will be determined by habitual internal tendencies, preoccupations, and cognitive styles, rather than being affected by features of the stimulus. In a word, respondents ‘‘project’’ their proclivities onto the stimulus. Projective measures are potentially very sensitive receptors for personality variation. As noted above, personality differences are clearest when individuals are confronted with unstructured situations; vague and ambiguous stimuli are unstructured situations. One might simply place the individual in an unstructured situation and observe which behaviors, emotions, and thoughts ensue.

The most popular unstructured stimuli for these purposes have been inkblots (e.g., the Rorschach and Holtzman stimulus sets), sets of pic- tures—selected for their ambiguity—about which stories are elicited (e.g., the Thematic Apperception Test [TAT] and its derivatives), and figure drawings; in the last case the individual is presented with blank paper and asked to draw a certain object (e.g., person, house, tree). Other commonly used unstructured stimuli include incomplete sentences (e.g., ‘‘Most people __.’’) and single words for which an association is elicited. The raw material provided by the respondent must then be

coded and interpreted with reference to response patterns of aggregate respondents. These measures capture aspects of personality covertly and indirectly; due to the ambiguity of the test materials, respondents are unlikely to guess what is being measured.

Though attractive in theory, projective measures have been problematic in practice. The rock upon which they are prone to founder is the crucial one of reliability. A first problem is that individuals’ responses to projective stimuli are affected by social context and environment, and to a considerable degree they change from one day to another. This problem may be partially solved by gathering responses to many stimuli, preferably on multiple occasions, and looking for consistent patterns across time and across stimuli. A second problem is that observers often have low levels of agreement with regard to coding and interpreting the stimuli; that is, there is often a great deal of interobserver noise obscuring any underlying signal. There have been recent attempts to create interpretive coding schemes with better reliability. The best example is Exner’s comprehensive system for the Rorschach (1986), which integrates features of several previous Rorschach scoring systems.

The Rorschach and the TAT remain fairly popular measures in clinical settings, and continue to generate a stream of research. Presently, however, many psychologists are skeptical about the usefulness of these measures, given the laborious, complex procedures for collecting and scoring data. One problem may be the sheer volume and range of the data that such free-response methods bring in; perhaps only a fraction of these data are of any importance, and we are not yet sure which fraction deserves the most attention. Projective measures might in the future become increasingly important, to the extent that they can be made more reliable, parsimonious, and efficient.

Other forms of data can be coded using the interpretive schemes developed for projective measures. For example, politician’s speeches, reports of early memories, and virtually any autobiographical material can be analyzed in much the same way as stories elicited from the TAT. Most often, such material has been analyzed in terms of implicit motivational features (e.g., achievement, power,

intimacy), and evidence suggests that such covertly measured motivation is not substantially correlated with indexes of similar content derived from structured measures of self-attributed motivation (McClelland et al. 1989). In general, autobiographical data seems to provide information outside that provided by personality questionnaires, given that individuals seem to store schematic beliefs about traits separately from autobiographical memories (Klein and Loftus 1993). Therefore, autobiographical data could become an important part of the comprehensive assessment of individuals.

WHICH TRAITS ARE WORTH MEASURING?

Whether the measurement method is overt or covert, another crucial issue concerns the particular traits that one ought to measure. Most commonly, this issue has been handled within a scaleconstruction strategy that might be called ‘‘rational’’: A researcher decides which trait (i.e., construct) he or she wants to measure, creates a pool of potential items, tries them out on a sample of respondents, and perhaps iterates between data and preconceived theory to create a relatively efficient measure of the construct. A second, ‘‘empirical’’ strategy is in some ways a variant of the first. The researcher includes in the sample of respondents one or more criterion groups (e.g., introverts, psychopaths, artists) and determines the set of items that best differentiates each criterion group from a control sample, thus leading to a ‘‘criterion-keyed’’ scale for the construct (e.g., introversion, psychopathy, creative temperament). In either strategy, the researcher begins with an a priori conception of what ought to be measured, but in the empirical strategy this conception is identified with a criterion group. It is not difficult to combine rational and empirical strategies, as was done in the only major revision of the original MMPI.

Unfortunately, a field that accumulates a great host of a priori conceptions can become quite chaotic, and this was the predominant state of affairs in personality measurement until at least the 1970s, when expert compendiums on personality traits could still be organized alphabetically by trait (e.g., London and Exner 1978), as if there were no other way to order them. There were

many constructs, and it was clear that some of them were related to others, but the structure underlying the whole set of constructs was unclear. From the early decades of the twentieth century, investigators seeking an ordering framework turned to a statistical technique called ‘‘factor analysis.’’ Factor analysis is a method for reducing a large number of observed variables to a smaller number of hypothetical variables (factors), by analyzing the covariances among the observed variables and identifying redundancies in the set of variables. Factor analysis can be used to identify parsimonious sets of variables within sets of items built by any scale-construction strategy. Historically, reviews of factor analyses of various collections of personality scales (e.g., French, 1953) have not led to a consensus on a common framework (Goldberg 1972).

Significant progress on the structural problem came largely by temporarily averting attention from the a priori constructs of experts in order to study those personality conceptions of laypersons that are embedded in the natural language. As noted at the outset, personality traits are socially meaningful phenomena about which laypersons comment and generalize, and the lexicon of any language is a repository of descriptors referencing a wide variety of human characteristics. The lexical hypothesis formalizes this state of affairs into a strategy for identifying necessary features for an organizing framework, or taxonomy, of personality attributes (Goldberg 1981). This hypothesis essentially states that the more important the attribute, the more likely people are to develop a word for it. The most important attributes will then be those represented by numerous terms (often representing specific aspects of broader concepts) within one language, and by recurrence across many languages. Once descriptors are gathered, for example from a dictionary, they can be used by individuals to describe themselves or others. Factor analysis of this data, in any language, can be used to search for a few dimensions underlying numerous descriptors.

Expert personality constructs are typically based on certain aspects of the lay descriptive vocabulary, but scientists may refine and extend lay distinctions in useful ways. Therefore, one cannot obtain a sufficient model of personality traits by