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Personality Theory and the Nature of Human Nature Robert Hogan

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Personality Theory and the Nature of Human Nature Robert Hogan Personality Theory and The Nature of Human Nature Robert Hogan & Ryne A. Sherman Hogan Assessment Systems Pre-print under review for special issue at Personality and Individual Differences Abstract This overview of modern personality theory makes six points. First, personality theory is crucial for understanding life. Second, life is largely about competition. Third, there is competition within groups for individual status, and there is competition between groups for collective survival. Fourth, academic psychology focuses on within group competition, but between group competition can be more consequential. Fifth, successful within group competition depends on social skill; successful between group competition depends on leadership. And finally, personality determines/explains the outcome of both forms of competition. Personality Theory and The Nature of Human Nature People are the deadliest invasive species in the history of the earth. People have the potential to kill every living thing and, in certain instances have already done so (e.g., passenger pigeons, western black rhinoceros, great auk) or are on their way to doing so (e.g., sea turtles, elephants, tigers, polar bears). Given their frightful potential and world-wide presence, it would be useful to know something about people. Personality psychology is the “go-to” discipline for understanding people; personality psychology is the only discipline whose primary focus is the nature of human nature. What does personality psychology tell us about human nature? The answer depends on whom you ask; or more precisely, to which theory of personality you subscribe. Modern personality psychology began in Vienna at the end of the 19th century, where an amazing flowering of human creativity brought revolutions in a wide variety of fields including architecture, music, physics, medicine, music, painting, literature, economics, and especially philosophy. Personality theory started as a psychodynamic version of psychiatry—mental illness was hypothesized to be a function of intra-psychic dynamics and the physical symptoms were secondary. The pioneers of this new way to conceptualize psychic troubles included Pierre Janet (who was French), Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Erik Erikson, and others. Personality theory was a vibrant intellectual activity for 70 years but by the early 1970s, some prominent personality psychologists began to argue that personality theory was pointless, that only data mattered. In retrospect, Walter Mischel’s (1968) critique of personality psychology was more a symptom of the decline of personality theory than a cause—it reflected a changing culture rather than creating one. The collapse of interest in personality theory created a hole in our ability to understand human affairs. This is because personality theory is unavoidable: everything we do depends on our assumptions about human nature. Even social psychology depends on (often untenable and unspecified) assumptions about human nature. We need to make these assumptions explicit for two reasons: (1) ideas have consequences—they drive everything we do; and (2) knowledge proceeds more efficiently from error than from confusion—bad ideas can be corrected, but unspecified assumptions lead to futility. The Three Theories of Personality Psychology There are three major theories of personality, with sub-types within each theory. The first is the many versions of psychodynamic theory associated with clinical psychology. The second is trait theory, which concerns cataloguing dimension of individual differences. The third is interpersonal theory which largely concerns career coaching and development—i.e., applications to everyday life. In the following paragraphs, we briefly describe the history of each theory, identify its core assumptions, and evaluate the consequences of these assumptions. Psychodynamic theory dominated personality psychology for 70 years and contains many valid insights. For example, early experience shapes later personality, much social behavior is unconsciously motivated, people are inherently irrational, and psychology can be used for human betterment. The three major assumptions of psychodynamic theory are: (1) everyone is somewhat neurotic; (2) the goal of life is to overcome one’s neurosis; and (3) the goal of personality assessment is to identify the sources of one’s neurosis. The problem with psychodynamic theory is the first assumption; everyone is not neurotic. Although most people have issues that bother them from time to time, to be neurotic is to be dysfunctional on a continuing basis and that is obviously not true for most people. In addition, as positive psychology points out, the absence of neurosis does not guarantee happiness or success. Lastly, diagnosing psychopathology is not the primary goal of personality assessment. Despite its compelling subject matter, psychodynamic theory pointed personality psychology in the wrong direction for 70 years. Positive psychology (Seligman, 2002) is a superficial, but natural, reaction to the excesses of psychodynamic theory. Trait theory began in the 1930s as an academic exercise in classification and is largely defined by the writings of Gordon Allport (1937), Raymond Cattell (1943), Hans Eysenck (1947), and their students. The goal of trait theory is to classify the structure of personality; the units of analysis are “traits,” defined as (a) recurring behavioral tendencies; and (b) neuropsychic structures. The behavioral tendencies can be observed; the neuropsychic structures are inferred and believed to correspond to the behavioral tendencies. Trait theory makes three major assumptions: (1) everyone has traits; (2) the goal of life is to discover one’s traits; and (3) the goal of personality assessment is to measure traits. Despite the immense popularity of trait theory in modern psychology, it has limited utility as a theory of personality for several reasons; here we will mention three. First, trait theory describes behavior in terms of traits, and then explains behavior in terms of traits (e.g., Mike Tyson is aggressive because he has a trait for aggressiveness); this is a tautology—as Walter Mischel (1968) pointed out long ago. Second, the search for the neuropsychic structures that explain the consistencies in behavior is a worthy project, but it is a project for neuro-scientists, not personality psychologists (it is also a project that has, thus far, yielded less than spectacular results). And third, the accepted taxonomy of traits, the Five-factor model (Wiggins, 1996), is based on ratings of school children in Hawaii (Digman, 1963) and Air Force enlisted men in Texas (Tupes & Crystal, 1961). Trait theory has in fact produced an common language for describing the reputation of others and identified a replicable structure underlying the trait terms. Nonetheless, it is not clear that the Five-Factor Model is (a) the most useful model for describing or predicting human behavior. In fact, there is compelling evidence showing that lower-order trait variables predict important outcomes better than the higher-order variables of the Five Factor Model (Brown & Sherman, 2014; Luminent, Bagby, Wagner, Taylor, & Parker, 1999; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001; Watson, 2001). Interpersonal theory is based on the writings of William McDougall (1908), George Herbert Mead (1934), Henry Stack Sullivan (1953), George Kelly (1955), Timothy Leary (1957), and Jerry Wiggins (1996). The goal of interpersonal theory is to understand how people interact with others and how those interactions influence subsequent interactions. Interpersonal theory makes three major assumptions: (1) almost everything consequential in life occurs during social interaction, or as part of preparation for future social interaction, (2) the goal of life is to find and retain a productive place in one’s social network, and (3) the goal of personality assessment is to describe and predict how people will behave in social interactions. Interpersonal theory differs from trait and psychodynamic theory in three important ways. First, trait and psychodynamic theory assume that the way we think about ourselves drives our social interaction whereas interpersonal theory assumes that our social interaction drives how we think about ourselves (others teach us how to think about ourselves). Second, trait and psychodynamic theory define maturity as self-understanding whereas interpersonal theory defines maturity as the ability to interact productively with others (i.e., as social skill). Third, trait and psychodynamic theory ignore reputation, whereas interpersonal theory assumes that establishing and maintaining one’s reputation is crucial for a productive life. Socioanalytic Theory. Our perspective, Socioanalytic theory, integrates interpersonal theory with evolutionary psychology. Socioanalytic theory makes three major assumptions: (1) People always live in groups, and every group has a status hierarchy and a religion; (2) the goals of life concern getting along, getting ahead, and finding meaning; and (3) the goal of assessment is to predict individual differences in the ability to get along, get ahead, and find meaning. There are huge individual differences in peoples’ ability to get along, get ahead, and find meaning and there are huge payoffs in terms of fitness for being able to do so. Evolutionary theory tells us that life is about competition. There is competition at the individual level (within groups) for status, power, and social acceptance; this competition is
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