What Is Personality Psychology?

Abstract

A mature discipline that cannot define its subject matter is like a sovereign country that has not defined its borders-although it has a sense of identity, the ambiguity at the edges invites hostile maneuvering. Mayer believes that personality psychology has an identity framework problem. Mayer is a serious scholar who has done a prodigious amount of reading; he proposes a well-thought-out model of the content of personality psychology, and he challenges others to provide a better one. In addition to registering general and enthusiastic approval of his project, I would make five further points. First, his article points up the significance of this journal. Mayer raises a very important issue, but his article probably would not be published in a so-called mainstream journal like Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We should all be grateful for the existence of Psychological Inquiry and the good judgment of the editor. Second, personality psychology is not the only branch of psychology whose subject matter is poorly defined. What, for example, is the subject matter of social psychology? It seems to be an evaluation of how situations influence social behavior. But Hogan and Roberts (in press) noted that after 90 years, social psychology has yet to provide a taxonomy of situations; this suggests that (a) there is nothing in the world that actually corresponds to a situation, and (b) social psychology is defined operationally as that which social psychologists do. Third, Mayer's complex and apparently exhaustive framework for the field is tied to the content of existing personality theories; it is an organization of the status quo. This means that, should an original theory be proposed, it would lie outside the framework and be defined out of existence. But as a wise man once remarked, To put limits to speculation is treason to the future. Fourth, my sense is that Mayer is not entirely successful in his effort to maintain a distinction between framework and theory. His relational system of personality constructs (cf. Table 2) looks very much like a prescription for a theory. He suggests that a competent theory must include a discussion of enablers (working memory), establishments (self-concept), types (extraversion), and agencies (superego). I have no problem with these requirements; my point is that the distinction between a formal, content-free framework, and the substantive requirements of a theory become blurred here. Finally, I too have spent a good bit of time thinking about the definition and content of personality psychology. My views are rather different from Mayer's, but I can summarize them quickly, and this might be an appropriate occasion to do so (for more detail, see Hogan, 1976). Personality psychology concerns analyzing the nature of human nature. The topic is of huge practical, moral, and political significance-virtually all public policy is predicated on assumptions about human nature-and personality psychology is the only empirical discipline that takes human nature as its explicit subject matter-which is why it is so important. Studying human nature is not an ambiguous, formless, or open-ended pursuit. Rather, evolutionary theory defines the parameters of the discussion. It is a relatively straightforward task to analyze the design requirements of the species by asking what it is that we evolved to do. For some very interesting examples of this kind of analysis, I recommend Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989), Lykken (1995), and Simpson and Kenrick (1997). I adopted a history of ideas approach to defining the content of personality psychology. In brief, the approach involves a content analysis in which one tries to identify the essential themes underlying the subject. Although some judgment is required, the reliability of the classification scheme can be readily established by