A non-reductive science of personality, character, and well-being must take the person's worldview into account.

Abstract

In his foundational work for personality psychology, Allport (1927, 1937) distinguished personality from character. Personality was, on Allport's account, a descriptive concept referring to a psycho-physical structure, whereas character was personality evaluated in accordance with moral norms. When he introduced the paradigmatic “lexical” method of deriving personality trait terms from the dictionary, he therefore sought to exclude all trait terms with ostensive normative content. This approach had a profound effect upon the field, and researchers are still today working on how to optimally purge personality of normative content (e.g., Backstrom et al., 2009; Pettersson and Turkheimer, 2010). Its appropriateness as a paradigm for the entire field of personality psychology can, however, be questioned (Kristjansson, 2012; Nilsson, 2014). It is plausible that some personality characteristics particularly relevant to psychic illness, human flourishing, and moral behavior are intrinsically value-laden (Cloninger et al., 1993; Cawley et al., 2000; Peterson and Seligman, 2004). I will focus on Cloninger's approach here, because he has, in addition to introducing an influential model of character, discussed the philosophical foundations of the study of character and well-being. For Cloninger (2004), character is not only value-laden; it refers to uniquely human aspects of personality representing “what people make of themselves intentionally” (p. 44), as contrasted with their animalistic temperament. He wants the science of character and well-being to transcend the dichotomy between materialist reductionism and Cartesian dualism, by taking the person's consciousness, agency, and processes of self-growth seriously while integrating this with knowledge about the human physical and biological constitution. Although I agree with this idea of having a non-reductive psychological science, I disagree with Cloninger about what it entails. I will therefore review Cloninger's (2004) approach from a philosophical perspective, in a critical and, hopefully, constructive way. I will defend a notion of non-reductive psychology based upon contemporary academic philosophy and argue that Cloninger's approach is not genuinely non-reductive. I will suggest that a non-reductive psychological science must take the person's worldview into account and argue that Cloninger's approach limits our understanding of human psychology by not considering the role of worldviews in the development of character and well-being.