A Tale of Two Visions : Can a New View of Personality Help I
Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire
Acknowledgment:
I am deeply appreciative of the help I received in preparing this article. Zorana Ivcevic and Marc A. Brackett read early versions of the manuscript and offered important comments that changed the article for the better. Mike Faber, Xiaoyan Xu, and my father, Arthur C. Mayer, read and/or commented on later drafts, which led to still further refinements. Sherry Palmer, of the University of New Hampshire Photographic Services, drew the computer-generated Figures 1 and 2 and contributed key ideas that led to their clarity and elegance. The last drafts of the manuscript were greatly improved by comments from David R. Caruso. The views expressed are those of the author.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: John D. Mayer, Department of Psychology, 10 Library Way, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, 03824. Electronic mail may be sent to: jack.mayer@unh.edu
What is human personality? Today, competing theories of personality provid
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> e a fragmented view of the inzidual. This article argues that a new systems framework for personality can clarify the field's mission and organize its concepts. The new integration creates a more contemporary, interesting picture of an inzidual's personality.The discipline of psychology emerged to address such questions as “Who am I?” and “How does the mind work?” (Allport, 1937; Robinson, 1976). Today, psychologists ask more specific questions, such as “How is a sentence stored in memory?” or “Which traits predict on-the-job success?” Some psychologists believe that to better answer such questions requires a more integrated and unified view of the field. Integrated viewpoints promote the use of zerse perspectives, methodologies, and procedures in addressing a given question (Henriques, 2003; Magnusson, 2001; McNally, 1992; Staats, 1991, Staats, 1999; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2001). Such integrations also require the use of a shared language, and that can lead to the clearer accumulation of knowledge (Henriques, 2003, p. 151).
Psychology's founders viewed the emerging discipline as studying a hierarchy of mental systems. At the lowest level were sensation, perception, and learning. Midlevel systems included motivation, emotion, memory, and intelligence. The highest level of such systems, remarked Wilhelm Wu
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> ndt (1897, p. 26), might be the “total development of a psychical personality.” Since then, personality often has been viewed as the combination of major psychological systems (Allport, 1937; Mayer, 1993–1994; Wolff, 1947). Personality psychology, from this perspective, studies how psychological systems are organized as a whole.The recent calls for integration in psychology, however, have largely ignored personality psychology's role. It is not hard to see why. Disciplines can be characterized in part by their fieldwide frameworks: the ordered list of topics used to present a discipline's subject matter. A field's framework creates an impression of what is studied and why. Whereas personality psychology was supposed to become a discipline that studied the collective action of other psychological systems, the discipline today often seems fragmented itself—if not prescientific (Derlega, Winstead, & Jones, 1991; Mendelsohn, 1993).
Today, personality's dominant fieldwide framework is the perspective-by-perspective approach. This approach describes personality from a succession of theoretical perspectives such as the psychodynamic, humanistic, social-cognitive, and evolutionary. This framework was originally judged useful not necessarily because the theories were correct but with the hope that the conflict amon
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> g them would generate important research (Funder, 2001; Hall & Lindzey, 1978, p. 705; Monte & Sollod, 2003; Pervin, Cervone, & John, 2005, p. 541). Since then, common interests among those who study personality have become apparent—for example, many personality psychologists are interested in the study of inzidual differences and traits such as the Big Five (Goldberg, 1993). Yet viewing the system from multiple perspectives may not adequately reflect such common pursuits.In this article's first section, I describe personality's perspective-by-perspective framework and its vision for personality. Then I describe a new framework: the systems framework for personality. The topics for this new framework are (a) identifying the personality system, (b) describing personality's parts, (c) understanding personality organization, and (d) tracing personality development.
In the article's second section, I describe the framework's first topic—its “opening act”—which includes defining personality, depicting where personality is, and examining the data that describe it. I also touch on the issue of personality structure and how conflicting structures can be accommodated in an integrated view.
The third section provides a fresh look at the areas of personality measurement, ps
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> ychotherapy, and the teaching of psychology. In the final section, I address how this new fieldwide framework might renew personality psychology and contribute to a more integrated psychology.A Tale of Two Visions: The Present Status of Personality and a Possibility of Change
The Dominant Vision
A fieldwide framework is an outline for the contents of the field. Such a framework is used in textbooks and by fieldwide research reviews to order their topics (Mayer, 1993–Mayer, 1994, 1998a). Aspects of that outline—its introduction, organization, and contents—create a view of a field. When a fieldwide framework works, it conveys the major contents of the field accurately and meaningfully.
The dominant framework of personality today, the perspective-by-perspective view, emerged gradually. Through the first half of the 20th century, theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Raymond Cattell, and Gordon Allport each developed a wide-ranging description of the personality system. These views were interesting, persuasive, and communicated one or another aspect of the human condition (e.g., Allport, 1937; Cattell, 1965; Freud, 1917/1966; Jung, 1945/1953; Rogers, 1951).
Hall and Lindzey (1957) then created a framework to present the theoretical work up
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> to that time. They began with a general description of what personality theories are. They then catalogued the theories one by one or in small groups and presented each one with a bit of discussion and nonpartisan evaluation. Over time, the theories grew in number and were combined into broader perspectives: the psychodynamic, humanistic, behavioral, and social-cognitive (Emmons, 1989). Those views and others make up the perspectives approach today. The work of Hall and Lindzey was both respected and influential (Norcross & Tomcho, 1994)—but what does it say, exactly, about personality?One of its implications is that personality is best viewed from conflicting worldviews on human nature—views which often cannot be readily reconciled. Depending upon one's opinion, the irreconcilable differences emerge because the perspectives (a) are fundamentally philosophical rather than scientific or (b) address different questions (Funder, 2001; Monte & Sollod, 2003, p. 653; Pervin et al., 2005).
To be sure, some common ground exists in the field. For example, many psychologists study the Big Three or the Big Five—two sets of traits that include such examples as Extraversion-Introversion and Neuroticism-Stability (John & Srivastava, 1999; Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, Teta, & Kraft, 1993). These traits, howe
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> ver, can provide only a limited view of the personality system by themselves. To envision personality more fully in the perspectives framework requires either picking a view sympathetic to one's own or picking and choosing the best ideas from each theory, but without guidance as to how to integrate them.A New Vision
There exists an alternative vision for the field of personality psychology. Psychology's founders perceived that the discipline would focus on such mental systems as sensation, perception, learning, and memory, as well as on larger systems that integrated them, such as intelligence and social behavior. There was room for still higher level systems that organized the rest. Early textbooks placed the self, the will, and similar topics at that pinnacle (Angell, 1908; James, 1892/1920; Wundt, 1897). These interests were gradually drawn together as the study of personality (Allport, 1937; Roback, 1927; Wolff, 1947; Woodworth, 1921).
Robert Sears provided a mid-20th-century perspective on such a systems approach in the inaugural volume of the Annual Review of Psychology. Personality, he wrote, could be studied according to its “development … dynamics of action … [and] structure” (Sears, 1950, p. 105). Sears's approach was used by subsequent Annual Review authors (e.g., Child,
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> 1954; Messick, 1961). He had, however, left the key terms structure and dynamics undefined. Questions ultimately arose over what the terms meant and whether the distinction was useful. Finally, Sears's approach was abandoned (Holtzman, 1965; Klein, Barr, & Wolitzky, 1967).In the 50-odd years since Sears's simple formula, several advances have occurred that have opened the door for a more formal systems framework. First, there has evolved a slow but successful effort to translate various theories into one another's language (e.g., Dollard & Miller, 1950; Erdelyi, 1985; Mayer, 1995a, Mayer, 1995b, 2001; Westen, 1991). This better indicates the shared concerns across perspectives.
Second, there has been the cross-theoretical use of concepts such as self-control and positive and negative feedback from general systems theories and cybernetics (Block, 2002; Carver & Scheier, 2002; Karoly, 1999; Mayer, 1993–1994; Pervin, 2001; Shoda, LeeTiernan, & Mischel, 2002).
Third, a growing body of research has placed the study of personality on a firmly empirical basis and has made lasting contributions to what we now know (Cervone & Mischel, 2002; Hogan & Johnson, 1997; Livesley, 2001; Millon & Lerner, 2003; Pervin & John, 1999; Reis & Judd, 200
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> 0; Sheldon, 2004).Finally, there has been a continued impetus to develop a clearer, more optimized systems approach for the field (Cervone & Mischel, 2002; Pervin, 1990, p. 12, Pervin, 2003; Sheldon, 2004). This has included the development of a formal fieldwide systems framework for personality psychology (Mayer, 1993–Mayer, 1994, Mayer, 1995a, Mayer, 1995b, Mayer, 1998a).
A New Framework: The Systems Framework
The systems framework discussed here intentionally refocuses on the original scientific mission of personality: to study the inzidual's global psychological functioning. The discipline of personality psychology is outlined using a new set of topics. The first topic, identifying the personality system, involves defining the personality system, locating personality amid its neighboring systems such as biology and the situation, and organizing the approaches taken to studying it (Mayer, 1995b, Mayer, 2004a). The second topic, describing personality's parts, involves collecting and categorizing the most important parts of personality (Mayer, 1995a, Mayer, 2003). The third topic, understanding personality organization, involves studying the system's relatively long-term structure and chief dynamic functions (Mayer, 2001). Finally, tracing personality development
... id="fontzoom" style="word-break:break-all;Width:fixed" zzz="106667"> involves examining the parts of personality and their organization over time (Mayer, 1998a).This new framework emphasizes the study of the personality system itself (rather than theories) and creates a new vision for the discipline. This vision can be introduced first by examining how personality is defined, positioned, and studied. Then the new view of personality can be applied to such areas as personality assessment, change, and education. In the next two sections I deal with each of these topics in turn.
The New Vision: Identifying and Studying Personality
Envisioning the Personality System
The first steps in envisioning personality are to define it and to locate it. Personality has been described here as a global system that emerges from smaller psychological subsystems:
Personality is the organized, developing system within the inzidual that represents the collective action of his or her motivational, emotional, cognitive, social-planning, and other psychological subsystems.
To visualize personality further involves not only defining what it is but also locating where it is. The fact that personality interacts with biological and social systems is generally agreed upon. For example, personality reads biological n
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