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studying lexical descriptors, but one can find necessary features for such a model, aspects that—based on their salience to lay observers—are too important to leave out. In this respect, lexical models of personality dimensions offer minimum-content criteria for other personality models, pointing clearly to some (but not all) of the trait concepts important enough to measure. In practice, lexical models have helped focus attention on important variables previously omitted from expert-derived models.

Lexical studies involve (1) culling descriptors from a dictionary; (2) omitting descriptors that are infrequently used or, by the consensus of multiple judges, refer to categories less relevant to personality (e.g., physical traits, temporary states); (3) aggregating the remaining descriptors (typically 300 to 400) into a questionnaire format with a multipoint (e.g., 1 to 5) rating scale; (4) administering the forms so constructed to a large (usually >400) sample of respondents for description of self, a well-acquainted peer, or sometimes both; and (5) factor-analyzing the descriptors to derive an indigenous or ‘‘emic’’ personality structure for that language. Such studies have been conducted in over a dozen languages, including English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Filipino, Korean, Turkish, and Hebrew.

Findings of these lexical studies (reviewed by Saucier 1997) show some variations, probably due to differences in sampling of subjects and variables as much as to actual differences between languages. But the most common result has been a robust structure of five independent (uncorrelated) factors, with apparent cross-language universality for the three largest of these factors: extraversion (which includes sociability, activity, and assertiveness), agreeableness (which includes warmth, generosity, humility, patience, and nonaggressiveness), and conscientiousness (which includes dependability, orderliness, and consistency). The remaining two factors (one referencing aspects of emotional stability, the other aspects of intellect, imagination, and unconventionality) are generally smaller and more variant from one study to another. Despite these partial inconsistencies between one emic structure and another, the five-factor structure, often labeled the ‘‘Big Five,’’ has been shown to be easily translatable into a large number of languages (McCrae et al. 1998). Moreover, the

Big Five appears to capture the structure of trait judgments about children as well as adults (Digman and Shmelyov 1996).

The Big Five has had considerable influence on personality questionnaires. For example, one prominent three-factor inventory (the NEO Personality Inventory) was revised to add the two missing factors from the Big Five, in this case agreeableness and conscientiousness (McCrae and Costa 1985). Moreover, the five factors have strong relations to the constructs measured by other prominent inventories, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the 16PF inventory, and the Personality Research Form. Four of the five factors (excluding intellect/imagination) are substantially correlated with measures of personality disorder symptoms and some mood, anxiety, and impulse control disorders cataloged in current psychiatric nosologies; a safe generalization seems to be that disorders tend to co-occur with extreme scores on personality dimensions (like the Big Five) on which there is wide variation in the general population (Costa and Widiger 1994). However, psychotic syndromes map rather poorly onto the Big Five, as do a few other clearly important individual-differ- ences constructs, like religiousness and attractiveness (Saucier and Goldberg 1998)

Although the Big Five have obtained some degree of consensus as an organizing framework for personality characteristics, there are at least five remaining issues whose resolution might lead to a different consensual structure: (1) The generalizability of the Big Five factors to languages spoken in non-Western, nonindustrialized nations, and indeed in less complex societies, is as yet uncertain. (2) The Big Five represent very broad, global trait constructs, and groups of more specific constructs are typically more useful in prediction contexts; however, there is as yet little consensus about the particular specific subcomponents that make up each of the broad factors. (3) There may be factors in related domains, such as abilities or attitudes, that could arguably be added to the model. (4) The organization of personality variables into factors based on lexical representation might be reasonably superseded by a set of factors based on a superior rationale, for example, correspondence to main lines of biological or environmental influence. And (5) there may be constructs

well represented among natural-language descriptors that will prove to be of great importance. Personality-relevant constructs with apparently meager representation in natural language descriptors, but attracting much current research interest, include those having to do with (1) defense mechanisms (Paulhus et al. 1997), (2) coping styles (Suls et al. 1996), and (3) personal goals and strivings (Pervin 1989).

One important criterion by which personality constructs might be added to, or eliminated from, a basic descriptive model is validity. Validity should be clearly distinguished from reliability: Reliability concerns whether a scale is measuring anything at all, and is a prerequisite to any form of validity. Validity concerns the meaning of a scale score, that is, the accuracy of the inferences one can make from the scale. For a construct that demonstrates validity, there is a good argument for meaningfulness and usefulness with respect to other phenomena. Validity evidence is gathered in an ongoing process, rather than in any single study.

A prior question, of course, is whether personality measures have a substantial enough degree of validity to make them worthwhile. Mischel’s early critique (1968) suggested they did not. An increasingly large volume of studies documents the many ways in which they do. For example, conscientiousness is a valuable predictor of effective job-related performance (even after the predictive value of intelligence is accounted for and removed), and has also been associated with increased longevity. Low scores on emotional stability (i.e., high scores on neuroticism) are predictive of higher rates of divorce, of male midlife crises, and of healthrelated complaints (though not actually greater illness). Agreeableness has associations with aspects of conflict (or absence of conflict) in close relationships, and extraversion predicts variation in a wide range of social-interaction variables.

PROSPECTS AND FURTHER

APPLICATIONS

As the foregoing review indicates, the science of personality measurement is no longer at the primitive stage represented by early taxonomies of virtues (such as those of Plato or Confucius), of physiological humors (such as that of Galen), or by

the pseudoscience of astrological signs which beckons from magazine racks. Unlike these approaches, current personality measurement is far more explicit about (1) defining personality, (2) measuring attributes in a standardized, reliable manner,

(3) attending to multiple sources of data, (4) checking the validity of hypothesized models, and (5) placing the plethora of possible constructs within a parsimonious and empirically justifiable organizing framework. Nonetheless, current scientific practices are inevitably based on assumptions that are subject to being overturned. Rorer (1990) provides a conceptual review of personality assessment with attention to differences between the assumptions of mainstream and alternative paradigms.

Personality as a discipline has come to be located mainly within the larger umbrella of psychology. This is reasonable, given that personality deals with the behavior, affect, and cognitions of individuals, and with individual differences. But certain aspects of personality seem to be equally relevant to other sciences. Many of the more inborn, dispositional aspects of personality are clearly rooted in biology and genetics, and personality change may well be associated with physiological changes—as cause or effect. Moreover, humans are social as well as biological beings, and personality functions within a social context. The sociological aspects of personality need more attention: Although Goffman (1972) proposed aspects of one useful sociological theory of personality, and Bellah et al. (1985) described certain social-struc- tural contexts that may foster narcissism, generally the relation of personality variation to its broader social context is but dimly understood.

In anthropology, one finds a rich tradition of studies of ‘‘culture and personality.’’ Past work in this area has been hindered by use of less than adequate personality measurement models. For example, many studies used projective personality measures with insufficiently developed reliability. If improvements are made in analysis of projective data, it may be possible to take a new look at old data. Moreover, linguists and anthropologists may be uniquely well equipped to gather and judge evidence pertinent to the cross-cultural universality of basic personality dimensions, and help answer several important questions: Which dimensions of interindividual variation are not only

measurable in any culture, but derivable from the indigenous language of any culture? What is the meaning of between-culture variation in the classification of personality characteristics? To what extent is ‘‘modal personality’’ a viable way of differentiating societies, or of mapping cultural change, and how do temperament and social structure interact? Do cultures differ in how they organize the heterogeneity that personality variation introduces?

The fascinating generalizations offered by Mead, Benedict, and others must be considered provisional, given the probably limited range and value of data upon which they are based. If waves of advancement in personality measurement were joined to waves of advancement in other social sciences, a powerful current might ensue, which would yield a far better understanding of societies in terms of the diverse range of humans within each of these societies.

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Psychological Science 6:325–332.

GERARD SAUCIER

PERSONALITY THEORY

WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

A definition of personality, and there are many such definitions, must precede a treatment of personality theory. One must note at the start that personality is not an entity or a thing. It is a mentalistic construct that serves as an abstract cognitive device for understanding (1) the characteristic ways human beings behave or are inclined to behave; (2) their perceptions of their defining characteristics; and in the view of many, (3) the common (in some cases measured) perception that others have of them. This view of ‘‘personality’’ overlaps to a great extent with William James’s view of self ([1890]1952), both psychological and social. Though personologists may at times refer to personality as if it had been reified, this stems less from their intention than from a limitation of the language used. Given this condition, one can only strive to assure as close a correspondence as is possible of the definition of this word with the complex reality it is intended to reflect and capture.

Definitions of personality vary depending on the standpoint—scientific, philosophical, humanistic, or strictly psychological—that one adopts. Personality for our purposes is one or another heuristic enabling social scientists to understand and predict human behavior, both overt and tacit, and individuals’ complex responses to the events that sweep over them daily. To speak of individuals’ personalities is to allude to all their longstanding, characterological properties that dispose them, given any set of circumstances, to respond in a predictable way. In popular parlance ‘‘to really know someone’’ is to understand that person’s self-concept and the idiosyncratic manner in which he or she deals with problems of daily life, whether social, political, or purely intrapsychic. In short, to know someone is to have a knowledge of their personality; but the personality of an individual is not a simple matter to assess. To realize this, one has only to consider that there is a shifting presentation of self as a function of the multifarious

situations in which one can find oneself. The same person with a single personality has a number of personae at his or her disposal for (generally) adaptive use.

It is useful to quote in this context a classic statement by William James:

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these images is to wound him. But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his teachers and parents, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘‘tough’’ young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our clubcompanions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. ([1890] 1952, chap. X, ‘‘The Consciousness of Self,’’ pp. 189–190)

This statement, written in the 1880s, has a modern ring, and clearly presages the later work of, say, Hartshorne and May (1928) and Walter Mischel (1968). Clearly it represents a theory of personality that is relativistic and relational. Relative to the former aspect, it invokes a double perspective. The first is the perspective of individuals as they present themselves very differently and even inconsistently in various contexts to different classes of people. The second is the perception of observers who make judgments about individuals’ personalities (or characters) based on the limited sampling of behavior they have witnessed either directly or indirectly. As such, it also presents the notion of self and of personality, though these two terms do not have identical meanings, as much more complex when viewed from within by the individual than when viewed from without by society. Relative to the relational aspect, personality appears to be shaped by the demand characteristics of the social group within which the individual performs. In this Jamesian perspective, personality is the flip side of self, that

is, observers’ characterizations of others as distinguished from the views that those latter individuals have of themselves. Indeed the everyday language that individuals use to describe themselves (as well as others) has provided the vocabulary (e.g., altruistic, aggressive, nurturant, inquisitive, venturesome) for defining the components of the construct, personality (e.g., Cattell 1964, 1965). Further, the equivalents of these terms, used to personologically distinguish individuals, can be found in most of the world’s languages. (This notion has been labeled the ‘‘fundamental lexical hypothesis,’’ and is addressed below.)

An individual’s identity—understanding of his or her character and typical patterns of behavioral responses to social and other environmental stimu- li—is the result not simply of their personal history, but of his or her construal of that history and of the either vivid or tacit memories that form the warp and weft of their self-understanding. It is generally accepted that memories are never absolutely veridical. The fact that false memories are more or less richly interlarded with relatively true memories suggests that personality as viewed from its owner’s standpoint is partially self-constructed. William James stated that ‘‘False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the consciousness of the me . . . The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences’’ ([1890]1952, p. 241). He asserts that this is a source of the errors in testimony that the individual has every intention of making honest. This is confirmed in more recent analyses (e.g., Laurence et al. 1998) that demonstrate that people’s characterization’s of themselves or others can be compellingly shaped by the situational as well as by intrapsychic demands that subjects experience when they must make judgments about personality. That these dynamics may be at work when individuals are completing even the bestvalidated and most reliable of personality inventories is reason to draw conclusions from such inventories with caution.

THEORIES IN GENERAL

Theories that have been developed to explain the dimensions of personality and the way personality develops are too numerous to describe (see Table

Table 1

1 for a partial list). They each have been zealously defended and propagated by their adherents. In spite of the paucity of empirical validation for most of them, this has not assured their demise. Though most of the large-scale, molar theories that are still studied have been developed in the twentieth century, the study of human personality has veered in the second half of the century toward the manageably molecular. The trend to fine, multivariate analyses of human behavior in the

established experimentalism of academia has created its own tension with the countervailing movement to holistic conceptualizations of personality. The synthesizing of psychosociological findings with those that are cognitive, affective, and psycho- neuro-endocrinological is a work in progress. At the end of the day, this scientific project has eventuated in scholarly specialization in numerous subdisciplines, which can only, with great difficulty and some contortions, be articulated

into a unified and coherent theoretical system. The task still needs to be addressed.

HISTORICAL PRECURSORS

It needs to be noted that theorizing about the determinants of human behavior in individuals as well as their social groups has its origins in antiquity and has progressed throughout history. There is a rich vein of philosophical speculation on this subject in the Greco-Roman civilization that was the seedbed of Western culture. Hellenistic thinkers and playwrights bequeathed a rich assortment of treatises and ideas to what would become EuroAmerican concepts of the nature of personality and its development. The ideas that are most salient for us and that have had the greatest impact on modern Western thought have come from the great Hellenistic thinkers that preceded the era of Roman cultural and military hegemony. Among the pre-Socratics, physiological theories of the development of personality can be traced at least to Empedocles. Later Hippocrates (fourth century B.C.E.) and still later Galen (second century C.E.) (Kagan 1994) postulated that the physical humors of the body are related to temperament. Blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm were linked, as these nouns suggest, to sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic temperaments, respectively. The specifics of this theory are given no credence today, but the principle that personality has physiological determinants (or at least correlates) is very much alive.

Plato and Aristotle proposed powerful models of human psychological development. In Laws, for example, Plato proposed an environmental perspective relative to the problems that are occasioned by parents’ overreactions to children’s spontaneous and immature behaviors.

The privacy of home life screens from general observation many little incidents, too readily occasioned by a child’s pains, pleasures, and passions which are not in keeping with a legislator’s recommendations, and tend to bring a medley of incongruities into the characters of our citizens. (Book 7, sec. 788)

He does not exclude a genetic perspective as the following passage from the same work attests.

Now of all wild young things a boy is the most difficult to handle. Just because he more than

any other has a fount of intelligence in him that has not yet ‘‘run clear,’’ he is the craftiest, most mischievous, and most unruly of brutes. So the creature must be held in check, as we may say, by more than one bridle—in the first place, when once he is out of the mother’s and the nurse’s hand, by attendants to care for his childish helplessness, and then further, by all the masters who teach him anything. (Book 7, sec. 808)

Plato’s student, Aristotle, was a more entrenched environmentalist than Plato. He affirmed the principle of tabula rasa in his treatise ‘‘On the Human Mind.’’

Mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, although actually it is nothing until it has thought. What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written. This is exactly what happens with the mind. (Book 3, chap. 4, sec. 430)

That the human personality evolves as a function of the myriad contingencies that befall a person during the course of life has been entrenched since classical times. Plato asserted that

While spoiling of children makes their tempers fretful, peevish and easily upset by mere trifles, severe and unconditional tyranny makes its victims spiritless, servile, and sullen, rendering them unfit for the intercourse of domestic and civic life. (Book 7, sec. 791)

RELIGION AND THE PATHOGNOMONIC

That the human character has dysfunctional and even evil propensities is a nomothetic principle that was propagated in Western thought as a salient dogma of the Christian church. Although widely rejected, it pervaded much of political and social theorizing up to and even beyond the seventeenth century. Its most radical expression was in the homilies of such divines as Jonathan Edwards. The biblical dictum ‘‘I was shapen in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me’’ (Psalm 51) founded in part the traditional Christian view that human nature is fundamentally flawed by ‘‘original sin.’’ It found expression in various vehicles of social thought and intellectual discussion of that time. The philosophers of the Enlightenment in

Europe repudiated this doctrine, although it continued to be propagated in religious circles and adumbrated in secular writings. The notion that human nature was essentially corrupt persisted in many of the systems of philosophy that flourished in the nineteenth century.

The dominant personality theorists of that period were clinicians with medical training. This professional background reinforced the pathological slant they gave to their descriptions of the human personality. Their theories of human psychological development gave prominence to the causes of deviant behavior rather than to the conditions for normal growth. Models of human personality were larded with dispositions to aggressive and narcissistic behavior. Freud in his more mature writings designated the aggressive instinct as one of the two pillars of his drive theory; the other, of course, was the erotic, a notion conceived in variously narrow and broad terms. His expansive pleasure principle was anticipated in the eighteenth century in the philosophy of Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham, a member of that school, stated that humans routinely engage in a ‘‘felicific calculus’’ ordained to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Twentieth-century theoreticians, principally university-based experimentalists, have striven to develop personological models focusing on wellness rather than on the pathognomonic. Gordon Allport is one of the outstanding representatives of this movement. Nevertheless the vocabulary, grammar, and notions of dysfunction and pathology continue to be woven into modern trait psychology. For example, Eysenck’s three-factor model of personality contains a psychoticism factor and a neuroticism factor, and neuroticism is one of the factors in the influential five-factor model of human personality postulated by William McDougall and most recently associated with the work of Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION

A contrary movement, often termed ‘‘humanistic,’’ is based on the self-actualizing and growthoriented models of Kurt Goldstein, Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, and many others in which

pathology is conceptualized as a departure from normality rather than a component of it. Rogers, for example, asserted that just as plants are shaped by the directions they must take in seeking sources of light, human beings evolve throughout their life spans by reaching for the emotional and social sustenance that will allow the ‘‘organismic valuing process’’ to shape them into fully effloresced and functioning persons. Intrinsic wickedness and pathology have no place in these models of human nature. And although human nature can be thought of in terms of fundamental human needs, as in Maslow’s Psychology of Being, the needs are not directed to destruction of self and others but to the fullest expression of a creative, generous, and joyful life expression. This is clearly in conflict with the psychodynamic models of nineteenth-century psychiatry, among them the Freudian system, which explained the engine of human development in terms of libidinal drives and tension reduction.

Self-disclosure and social transparency is one of the more healthful aspects of this model of the normal personality. O. Hobart Mowrer stated that psychological health depends on conditions that ensure transparency, and he traced its historical roots as far back as the ancient practice of exomologesis, in which a community of believers periodically engaged in collective confession of their violations of community mores, as in the monastic communities of the (Semitic) Essenes. This principle finds its most celebrated expressions in the psychotherapeutic literature. Moritz Benedikt, in the last third of the nineteenth century, and Carl Gustav Jung, in the twentieth, made it central to their therapeutic systems. They emphasized the critical importance for patients of divulging the ‘‘pathogenic secrets’’ that are woven into the fabric of their lives. A modern expression of this burgeoned in the 1960s in the therapeutic community (TC) movement, in locations such as Daytop Village and Phoenix House, where each day began with a morning meeting in which each member of the ‘‘family’’ publicly recounted his or her failures of the preceding day.

That we know more than we can tell and that we know more than we are aware that we know has been postulated since the pre-Socratics of Hellenistic Greece. Johann Christian Reil’s seminal work, ‘‘Rhapsodien,’’ published in 1803, describes the phenomenon of multiple personalities, and a complex topographical model of the human psyche. It

is rarely questioned as we approach the twentyfirst century that our behavior is influenced and our personality shaped by information that is sedimented in the organism, to paraphrase MerleauPonty, but which exists at a subsymbolic level and cannot in every instance be consciously accessed. The somatic-marker hypothesis of Antonio Damasio (1994; see chap. 8, pp. 165–201) is a recent expression of this position, which has profound implications for our conceptualization of what ‘‘personality’’ is and how it is shaped.

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND

PERSONALITY THEORY

It is self-evident to the psychologist that one cannot treat the construct of personality without grounding it in a scientific developmental psychology. This is true even of those theories that are simply descriptive rather than causal-explanatory. Persons are not born with personalities, although Thomas and Chess (1980), for example, have demonstrated in their widely cited New York Longitudinal Study that temperamental traits, constituents of some models of personality, are strongly influenced by hereditary factors. Personalities develop from infancy to adulthood and, indeed, across the life span. If the developmental psychology on which a personality theory is based is seriously flawed, then it is highly probable that that personality theory, itself, is also flawed. Ausubel et al. (1980) have reviewed a large number of developmental theories and their derivative personality theories. These theories range from the preformationist and quaintly theological to the most social and educationist systems that have flourished in the humanist climate of late-twenti- eth-century Western thought. They are, it must be emphasized, of unequal value. It flows from this that as the prevailing models of developmental psychology have evolved in the light of empirical research, personality theories have also had to evolve. For example, in the measure that the psychosexual stage theory of human development proposed by Freud a hundred years ago has been superseded and, arguably, discredited, to that extent has Freudian personality theory become superannuated. This can be stated of a number of personality theories whose value to scholars is now largely of a historical character. It is useful to add at this point that a theory of developmental psychology is a theory of personality as long as it

provides an integrative and broad-scale view of the way human beings develop socially, psychically, and characterologically.

THE MOVEMENT TO HOLISM

Holism, a much-used term of Greek etymology, characterizes an approach to understanding human personality that integrates all aspects of the person and, more recently, the social matrix in which it has been shaped and finds expression. Human psychology that attempts to explain behavior by appeal to only one ‘‘faculty’’ or one dimension of the human organism, that restricts itself to, say, simply rationalist or neuroendocrinological processes without understanding the systemic character of personality, has largely fallen into disfavor. Jan Christian Smuts, Alfred Adler, and Kurt Goldstein were early proponents of an integrative and holistic approach to the study of human beings, integrating organicist as well as social dimensions in a comprehensive view of personality and its determinants. Abandonment of fragmentary models has increased the appeal of Maturana and Varela’s work (1980). Situated in a constructivist tradition, this work is not only biological but also profoundly social-psychological in its conceptualization of the human person. For example, these researchers’ concept of ‘‘autopoiesis’’ is that the integrity and unity of the organism is generated from within, even as it interacts with and accommodates its surroundings. Every person is a self-organizing entity. The feed-forward mechanisms of which modern constructivists speak indicate that knowledge is to a great extent the construction of schemas involving the total organism. In this respect even the human’s immunological system is part of a larger knowing system. The congruence between this vision and the self-actual- izing models of Goldstein, Maslow, and Rogers is obvious. Unidimensional systems have evolved toward multidimensionality. Personologists have increasingly pursued the goal of formulating integrative models of human experience.

‘‘Holism,’’ as an approach to understanding human personality, can now be characterized more broadly as biopsychosocial. The knowledge that individuals have of themselves, whether tacit or conscious, is not simply intrapsychically determined. That knowledge is a function of what they