President's Column
David C. Funder
It has been a pleasure as well as an honor to serve as President of ARP over the past two years, but I look forward to passing this responsibility to Will Fleeson, who will bring great ideas and new energy to the Association. The high point during my term, of course, was our second-ever stand-alone meeting held in Riverside, California in June. It was exciting to be surrounded by 200 psychologists all talking about personality, and not afraid to admit that was what they were talking about!
Jack Block once told me that personality psychology is the apex of psychology, because it subsumes all the other subfields. In his view, cognitive, biological, developmental, and even social psychology are important only to the degree that they inform our understanding of the psychology of individual persons. A corollary of this observation is that many people in these other subfields are actually personality psychologists whether they know it—or, rather, admit it—or not. In particular, many of our colleagues who identify as social psychologists study topics like self-esteem, self-schemas, implicit theories, personal strategies, chronic sensitivities, persistent mood, overall well-being, and so forth. All of these describe patterns of behavior, cognition, or emotion that persist over time and are important in many life contexts. In another word, they study traits.
I think some of these colleagues think that unless they study the Big 5, their work has nothing to do with personality. I also suspect some others avoid seeing themselves as personality psychologists because they do not use a personality scale developed by somebody else. Instead, they use a measure of individual differences that they probably made up themselves, sometimes without doing the basic psychometric work of assessing its reliability, factor structure, or validity (especially discriminant validity). I guess the idea is that if you never do basic psychometrics on your measure, then it's not a trait assessment. But I don't really blame these colleagues. How many Ph.D. programs in social psychology even offer, much less require, a basic course in measurement?
So here is what I suggest that those of us not afraid to be identified as personality psychologists can do. First, whenever a colleague presents some research on an individual difference variable, congratulate her or him on the excellent personality research and interesting trait that she or he is working on! If your colleague blanches, pat her or him on the shoulder and say, “It's OK, it's really OK to be a personality psychologist.” Second, as gently as possible, see if you can suggest that the individual difference measure undergo just a wee bit of development, such as assessing its reliability, its internal structure, or even—most threatening of all—whether it correlates highly with any of the Big Five! Third, invite this colleague to the next ARP meeting and promise that what she or he does will be of great interest. Fourth and finally, when this colleague does come to our meeting, greet her or him with open arms.
Personality is not actually the small field that even some personality psychologists think it is. The only thing we need to do is to teach our colleagues who are already doing personality research that is what they are doing. The next step, of course, will be to help them to do it better.