Dan P. McAdams and Jennifer L. Pals
The Big Idea
One chronic problem with depending on research results as an aid to coaching practice is the practice of research itself. All too often researchers are engaged in an on-going competitive practice of their own: grand theory building. The theories themselves are generally not that complicated, but the continuous defence of them against adversaries creates a good simulation of a contact sport. A consequence is perpetual uncertainty regarding whether there is progressive improvement in our understanding of the issue or problem at hand.
In the case of personality psychology, such has been the case. Its history is a lengthy roll call of one research personality after another getting into the fray, proposing yet another possible explanation of what makes human beings tick, maybe leading the league for a while, only to be replaced by another upstart researcher with a more attractive game plan.
The authors of this paper aim to do better. They put forward a far-reaching, comprehensive and integrated account of what the field itself is about: finding an integrative framework for understanding what it is to be a person. To that end they propose five new organising principles for understanding the whole person. If these new Big Five fundamental principles do stand the test of time, they may give renewed enthusiasm for the explanatory power of personality psychology to become relevant for both self-understanding and our mutual understanding of one another—both understandings desperately needed in everyday life.
Takeaways
- Personality psychology as a field of research has returned from the near-dead in the 1970s.
- In the last few decades the field has begun to fulfil its mission of making sense of the individual human life.
- There was early enthusiasm for a five-factor model of personality, but it failed to integrate a framework for whole-person personality understanding.
- In this paper Five Big Principles are proposed that do make this integrative claim.
- The five principles include evolution, dispositions, characteristic adaptations, life narratives, and the differential role of culture.
- Together, these principles describe the way dispositional traits function both in human evolutionary significance and the more context-driven responses to social tasks and culture-driven life meaning.
- While no specific practical outcomes are discussed, the more we know about how we become individual persons the more we know about how to become better persons.
- Better persons make better coaches and better athletes.
The Research
In the general history of personality psychology there hasn’t been much progress on developing an integrated and comprehensive understanding of the whole person. But things are finally changing. About three decades ago a five-factor model of human personality gained widespread acceptance in the field. The five identified personality traits were: extraversion (vs. introversion), neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. But even with these five trait categories identified, the accumulated wisdom still fell short of consolidating these findings beyond mere trait theory and into an elegant theoretical frame.
In this research paper, the call is for exactly that: an ambitious integrative understanding of human individuality. And so, we have suggestions for a New Big Five. By way of it, these researchers continue the longstanding effort to describe the species-typical characteristics of human nature. By this they mean to better understand how the individual person is at once like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other person.
While it might be said this is just another fuzz buzz in the field of personality psychology, this is the first time there has been general enthusiasm for the inclusiveness of the framework. Through it these researchers believe there is more hope than ever to make psychological sense of the individual human life. Hope returns that this approach might be helpful for practitioners. What follows is a brief description of the New Big Five principles.
Principle 1: Evolution and Human Nature
The first principle is this: Human lives are individual variations on a general evolutionary design:
- Here is how and why every person is like all other persons.
- The first principle is the idea that an integrative science of persons arises from the imprint of biological sciences.
- Instead of seeing this evolutionary principle as one alternative theory of personality to be contrasted to humanistic or cognitive psychology, this is proposed as the very first principle of the scientific understanding of people.
- We are individual variations of a common design.
- The web of this design includes physical needs, innate social/cognitive mechanisms, psychological needs, and sociocultural practices.
Principle 2: The Dispositional Signature
The second principle is this: Variations on a small set of broad dispositional traits implicated in social life constitute the most stable and recognisable aspect of psychological individuality.
- Examples of these dispositions are friendliness, dutifulness, depressiveness, feeling vulnerable, and so on.
- Dispositional traits refer to the style of a person’s adjustment to the social world; how a person does things, thinks, or feels. They are a rough outline of human individuality.
- This is how every person is like some, but not all other persons. In other words, what kind of person is this person?
Principle 3: Characteristic Adaptations
The third principle is this: Beyond dispositional traits, human lives vary with respect to a wide range of motivational, social-cognitive, and developmental adaptations in the context of time, place, and/or social role.
- Here is where individuality grows.
- Adaptations include goals, plans, strategies, values, virtues, self-images, significant others, and the like.
- These adaptations are more likely to change over time than traits are; it is more a doing of things than having traits.
- Whereas traits speak of consistencies across situations and over time, characteristic adaptations reveal how contexts become particularised in both predictable and unpredictable ways.
- Beyond pointing to what kind of person this is, characteristic adaptations move in the direction of who this person is.
Principle 4: Life Narratives and the Challenge of Modern Identity
The fourth principle is this: Beyond dispositional traits and characteristic adaptations, human lives vary with respect to the integrative life stories, or personal narratives that individuals construct to make meaning and identity in the modern world.
- We humans construe our lives as ongoing stories.
- These life stories help shape behaviour, establish identity, and integrate us into modern social life.
- Out stories, however changing they may be over time, give a person’s life unity, purpose, and meaning.
- If dispositional traits sketch the outline and characteristic adaptations that fill in the details of human individuality, our stories give us our uniqueness and cultural meanings.
- As a process, the effort to put our life experiences into narrative form influences psychological growth, coping, development, and well-being.
- Life stories give us our unique self; they also tether us to the centre of our culture.
Principle 5: The Differential Role of Culture
The fifth principle is this: Culture exerts different effects on the levels of personality. Modest effect on our phenotype trait expression; stronger impact on characteristic adaptations; and a deep effect on our life narratives.
- Culture is the remarkably wide-ranging mix of meanings, practices, and discourses about human life that define a society or given group.
- Cultures are in effect created by the life stories of those who member it.
- Stories are cultivated throughout culture creating, whether as lessons, as ideals, as heroic, as warnings, as metaphors, as wise or foolish, good or bad, dignified or ignoble.
- Life stories help us learn how to live within a culture of our own creating.
Concluding thoughts
The authors of A New Big Five bring their paper to its end by discussing the value of a newer way to integrate internally connected personality components which heretofore were historically disconnected. The result is an over-arching theory of human personality.
Mostly in their concluding commentary they discuss the impact on the other branches of psychology, on reviving the historical mission of psychology, and on clinical and counselling psychology. In other words, they have restricted the implications of this big idea to its professional psychological sciences usefulness.
But its inherent usefulness extends well beyond academics. Knowing how we are like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other persons gives each individual person a common identity, an uncommon and self-defining story, and a cultural fabric with which to belong. And what do we learn? We learn that everyone counts or no one counts.
