Six visions for the future of personality psychology.

Abstract

This is an exciting time to be a personality psychologist. A few years ago a distinguished colleague described the field as "coming out of a tailspin." He was right, but things are much better now. Personality psychology's important contributions are having an increasing impact as creative researchers push forward with programs on topics as diverse as the molecular biology of genetics and the psychological dynamics of people who have been socialized in more than one culture.Personality is the most important topic in psychology because it is where all the other areas come together. Cognitive psychology describes how people think and perceive. Developmental psychology traces the course of a person's psychological construction and change from infancy throughout life. Biological psychology explains the underpinnings of behavior in anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolutionary history. And social psychology concerns how people respond to and affect the behavior of others. All of these subdisciplines serve personality psychology, the only field with the self-assigned mission of explaining whole people. It does this by focusing on individual differences, for the most part, but this is only natural. People are different from each other, and an understanding of how and why they differ necessarily entails a complementary understanding of the ways in which they are the same.So it is a bit surprising, in retrospect, what a difficult time personality has sometimes had in gaining the attention and even respect of the rest of psychology, not to mention the world at large. I can identify at least three historic reasons for this difficulty. First, personality psychology has long been identified in the minds of many people with the first (and perhaps only) course in the subject that they took in college. Too often, this was (and sometimes still is) the classic "tour of the graveyard" that focuses on brilliant but long-deceased theorists and leads students to end the semester thinking the burning concern of the field is the disagreement between Freud and Jung (see Laura King's contribution later in this chapter). I actually defend the inclusion of Freud and Jung in modern personality courses, in measured doses, but a course that is restricted to theorists like these is an unforgivable misrepresentation of the field, a failure in one's duty to educate students, and a slap in the face to every contemporary personality researcher.A second source of personality's difficulty is, of course, Mischel's (1968) critique and the ensuing decades of arguments, rebuttals, and obfuscations. The controversy resulted in some hard-won enlightenment (Kenrick & Funder, 1988) but also left behind damage that included decimated or disestablished graduate programs, careers that ended prematurely or never even began, and a lingering image in the minds of a surprising number of smart psychologists outside the field that "personality" is a quaint,

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