Persons in situations: distinguishing new wine from old wine in new bottles

Abstract

An ambitious scientist dreams of overturning conventional wisdom and establishing a new paradigm that will provide a grand theoretical synthesis of the field. This commentary examines the articles of this special issue to distinguish what might be new from what is déjà vu to traditional, mainstream trait psychology. To accomplish this, the commentary begins with an exposition of how trait concepts are used in the natural sciences. This exposition is meant to correct a straw-man concept of traits, offered by some psychologists, as ‘unmodulated consistencies in . . . behavior across time and diverse situations’ (Kenrick and Funder, 1988, p. 24). After presenting an accurate view of the trait concept, I examine what the authors of these articles offer as alternatives to traits, traditionally conceived. This examination shows that the authors occasionally misrepresent traits, and that in some cases their offered alternatives are actually quite similar to traditional trait conceptions. I end by describing what the traditional trait approach considers to be reasonable goals for personality psychology and the most promising methods for reaching those goals. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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