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Toward an Integrative Personality Psychology
Artur NilssonLund University, Sweden
The 13th European Congress of Psychology, July 10th, 2013, Stockholm, Sweden
The problem
Integrative work has special importance for personality psychologyMany personality psychologists, such as Allport, Mayer,
and Pervin, have, following William Stern, described personality as a unified system.
Others, like Dan McAdams, deny that personality is necessarily a unified system, but nevertheless maintain a strong integrative theme in our understanding of the whole person.
The philosopher Donald Davidson has demonstrated that the attribution of unity is integral to the interpretation of any creature as a linguistic being (i.e. a person). Unity increases the scope, and consequent power, of our theories of behavior.
How do we facilitate such integrative work?
We need a conceptual framework that is integrative and comprehensive to guide integrative personality research and idiographic interpretation!
Previous attempts to construct such a framework(e.g. McAdams; McCrae & Costa; Mischel & Shoda) are too descriptive, thus threatening to reify the field and stifle critical normative thinking.
1. The study of personality consists of the study of traits, defined as objective behavioral regularities, and the study of worldviews, defined as subjective sources of meaning
Theses
2. Traits and worldviews are mutually irreducible and equally basic aspects of personality (e.g. in terms of universalism)
3. We need to account for unity not just within traits, but also within worldviews and between traits and worldviews
Argument for thesis 1
1. Personality psychology is concerned with behavior
2. Behavior is described not just mechanistically but also as laden with meaning and intentionality (reason-based action)
5. Therefore, worldviews need to be studied in their own right, as sources of meaning in personality
3. Reasons are constitutive of actions. E.g. an altruistic action is altruistic only if it expresses an altruistic intention.
4. Reasons are partly constituted by a background of beliefs, goals, values, etc. (”the holism of the mental”).
The study of traits
The reduction of traits to causal structure is problematic:1. It would require us to measure and conceptualize traits in
behavior-independent, self-report independent, idiosyncratic terms (Boag, 2011; Harré, 1998; Lamiell, 1987)
2. It is based upon the false presupposition that the only type of explanation at our disposal is the mechanistic one
Trait constructs summarize the complex objective patterning of behavior, thus making it intelligible. Stability is the demarcating ideal.
Includes not just the Big Five, but also socio-cognitive and other traits, and both mental and observable behavior
Traits explain non-mechanistically!
To explain a phenomenon in terms of a trait is:
(a)to make it intelligible by fitting it into a pattern
(b)that includes theoretical assumptions about rationales and capacities associated with the trait
(c) in an empirically adequate way
The study of worldviewsWorldview constructs summarize the person’s subjective meanings. Demarcated by centrality as source of meaning.
Meanings are conceptual and propositional mental contents and the epistemic, emotional, and conative-volitional attitudes held toward them.
Central sources of meaning are the concepts, presuppositions, and scripts through which we think, feel, and act; the background, substrata, or skeleton of intentionalityBoth abstract philosophical notions (e.g. free will) and experientially derived (life-narratives and goals), whether conscious and deliberated or unconscious and internalized
On a philosophical note, I am not suggesting that mental states are entirely transparent to the subject. Persons do not necessarily understand, or have the ability to verbalize, the depth structure of their subjective ontology.
This makes the study of worldviews more dependent upon expert vocabulary than the standard lexical trait approach.
Limitations of previous worldview research
Worldviews are treated as derivatively interesting insofar as they cause particular behaviors (socio-cognitive theory) or form part of mental regularities (trait theory); not as sources of meaning in personality
It consists of scattered islands of research. There is no systematic top-down study or taxonomy of broad worldview patterns (cf. the Big Five).
Personality models that take meaning into account include goals, view of self and life events (e.g. Kelly; Little; McAdams), but not view of world, society, and life in general
Examples of worldview constructs
Goals, life-story narratives, lay theories of persons and groups, just-, dangerous-, competitive-, static-, mechanistic-/organismic-, and benevolent-world beliefs, moral intuitions, values, assumptions about human nature, socio-political attitudes, beliefs about free will and determinism, ontological and religious beliefs, epistemological beliefs
Are traits and worldviews really different?
Objection: Persons can have stable ways of viewing the world, therefore worldviews are traits (Allport, 1966)
They provide different kinds of information, illuminating personality from different perspectives (objective/subjective):• Trait self-report: proxy for objective
behavioral regularities, e.g. ”I tend to/usually/often/seldom get irritated”
• Worldview self-report: current subjective experience regardless of its truth or falsity, e.g. ”I believe that we should be tough on crime, ”Human nature is basically good”
They focus on different kinds of discourse (e.g. culturally novel, cognitively sophisticated, unusual phenomena..)
Are traits more basic than worldviews?
Traits are often thought of as more inherently universal and worldviews as relatively more culture-dependent
But theory and research on values (Schwartz), social beliefs (Leung et al.), and moral intuitions (Haidt et al.) indicate a high degree of universalityDespite our different historic-cultural worlds, there are: • universal existential conditions: changeableness
and terminality of life, social relationships, human limitations, injustice and evil, freedom, relation to nature …• and a common biological constitution for endowing the world with meaning
If we take the intentional level of description seriously, universalism is in fact a methodological approach rather than a property of traits or worldviews per se
A universalist approach emphasizes commonalities and strips away layers of cultural meaning for intercultural comparability
A historic-cultural approach studies personality aspects in their historic-cultural embedment, emphasizing differencesBoth approaches are usefully applicable to both traits and worldviews
Normative implications• Worldviews need to be studied systematically
in their own right, as basic sources of meaning in personality
• We need to account for, and search for, unity not just within traits (i.e. the consistency of behavior), but also within worldviews and between traits and worldviews
• This includes applying a universalist approach, and investigating developmental origins, and heritabilities
• The conclusions are equally applicable to individual differences and personalistic approaches
But how do we study worldviews systematically?
1. Factor analyzing worldview items
2. Trying to find worldview items that map onto current models of traits
3. Theoretical analysis of similarities and differences between worldview models
