To appear in M. Mikulincer & R. Larsen (Eds.), DC ...

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To appear in M. Mikulincer & R. Larsen (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Final submitted version before copy-editing.

Six Visions for the Future of Personality Psychology Ver?nica Benet-Mart?nez, M. Brent Donnellan, William Fleeson, R. Chris Fraley, Samuel D.

Gosling, Laura A. King, Richard W. Robins and David C. Funder

"Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past." -James Q. Wilson (quoted in Pinker, 2011, p. 118)

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 these sub-disciplines 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

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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 (Funder) 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, outdated idea that exaggerates the role of individual differences. The phrase "fundamental attribution error" causes personality psychologists to cringe whenever they hear it, for good reason. It serves to entrench the mistaken idea that to see

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personality as important is to be victimized by some kind of cognitive shortcoming.1 The third source of difficulty for personality is more self-inflicted, as communities of

researchers focus on topics of great interest to themselves but of less concern to anyone else. It's interesting to debate about whether the Big Five are really Six or Seven, for example, but does anyone other than a certain kind of personality psychologist really care? I hasten to add that the question of trait structure is in fact important and even foundational for a good deal of work that does have broader relevance (and is touched on by several authors in this volume), such as (for example) predicting health outcomes or occupational success. But to the extent that researchers spend their limited time and resources on a topic like this for its own sake, rather than because of its implications for larger issues, they are limiting the reach and relevance of their field -- and should not be too surprised if, when it comes time to hand out grants or faculty positions, they find themselves and their colleagues pushed towards the bottom of the list.

So as we look ahead to the future of personality psychology, we need to be cognizant of both the positive and negative lessons of the past. I recently attended a lecture where the speaker said that the secret of good health is simple: "Do the things that are good for you, and stop doing the things that are bad for you!" The health of personality psychology, as a discipline, will be similarly enhanced by following this excellent advice.

The specifics are fleshed out in the six contributions that constitute the heart of this chapter. A distinguished group of personality psychologists, all at (or still approaching) the height of their careers, were asked to envision the future of the field. As you will see, each proffers advice about what to do as well as what to avoid. The contributions were written entirely independently and have been only minimally edited, so it is interesting and instructive to

1 We would have all been so much better off if the original term "correspondence bias" had been maintained (Jones, 1990).

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notice the common themes that emerge across them, along with an almost total lack of substantive disagreement. To a surprising degree, what you are about to read is a consensus view of the future of personality psychology. Issues, Methods and Training -- R. Chris Fraley

Future Areas of Concern or Interest to Personality Psychologists. I suspect that many of the areas of concern and interest that have characterized personality psychology over the past few decades will continue to be of interest in 30 years. Simply put, many of the questions that we concern ourselves with as a field are timeless questions (e.g., What is the structure of individual differences? How does identity develop? How do basic biological and sociological factors constrain our development?) I refer to these timeless questions because (a) they are the kinds of questions that have been at the forefront of discourse about the human condition for millennia and (b) they are the kind of questions that cannot be answered definitively simply because our ability to address them is limited by our methods--methods that improve over time as technology evolves, as our conceptual models are refined, and as our data sources become more extensive. Undoubtedly some new content areas will emerge in 20 to 30 years, but I suspect the core questions motivating personality science will be the same as those that motivate students of personality today.

If we take today's topic areas and extrapolate from there, I think there are at least four broad research topics we will see in 30 years:

Personality development. There is still a lot to be learned about the ways in which basic personality processes are assembled and unfold over time (see Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). In my opinion, the main limiting factor in the study of personality development at the moment is not theory, but the acquisition of data that are able to capture fully the way in which lives are

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lived, experienced, and change over time. Personality dynamics and within-person processes. One of the things I have found

fascinating is that, in my brief time in the field to date, personality psychology has gone from a field characterized largely by between-persons analyses of individual differences to a field that has made serious and progressive steps toward studying within-person processes. These advances were due in large part to the efforts of scholars to collect intensive multi-wave data within persons (e.g., Fleeson, 2001), along with the development of analytic techniques that were designed to better separate within-person effects from between-person effects (e.g., Nezlek, 2007). I hope that in 30 years it will be routine, if not trivial, for researchers to examine withinand between-persons sources of variation in tandem in their attempts to understand personality organization and dynamics, and for graduate departments in the future to routinely teach the analytic tools necessary to study such complex processes.

Micro-level studies of personality. Personality psychologists have had a long-standing interest in understanding the physiological processes underlying personality traits. In recent years, DeYoung, Gray, and Canli (just to name a few) have taken some valuable steps towards building conceptual models of how neurological systems might underlie individual differences in personality traits. Moreover, although the work is still in its infancy, research at the interface of molecular genetics and personality is likely to become more prominent over the years. My impression is that scholars are currently struggling to make sense of the data in this burgeoning area, with some scholars even feeling a bit demoralized. But I think the basic issues are important and I suspect this is one of the areas where we will see some novel insights and breakthroughs over the next 30 years.

Macro-level studies of personality. As I will highlight again later, the field is currently

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