An Interview with 2013 Block Award Winner Robert R. McCrae
by Angelina Sutin
You have made many significant contributions to personality. Which finding has made the greatest impact on the field? Which finding are you the most proud of?
Clearly, our rediscovery and advocacy of the FFM in the 1980’s has had the most impact, not only on personality psychology but on allied fields like developmental, clinical, and I/O psychology, and on other social sciences and medicine. There’s even a heavy metal rock band called 5 Factor Model.
I suppose there is a recency effect, but I am most proud of a couple of PSPR papers. In 2011, John Kurtz, Shinji Yamagata, Antonio Terracciano, and I compiled data gathered by researchers around the world on the reliability, heritability, stability, and cross-observer validity of the 30 facets of the NEO-PI-R. We used these data to compare the utility of internal consistency and retest reliability as predictors of scale validity. I was of course pleased that our instrument had been so widely used that such an analysis was possible. I was also struck by the findings: Retest reliability was a good predictor of validity, whereas internal consistency was not. Why? It took me a couple of years to figure that out, and a new PSPR paper argues that a lower level of the personality trait hierarchy—nuances that are distinguished by the specific variance of individual items—can explain it. There are also other implications of taking scale- and item-specific variance seriously, like the need for extreme caution in using single-item scales.
If you had to pick a high point in your career, what would it be and why? What about a low point?
The moments that stand out in my memory are always epiphanies of data: When Dave Schroeder brought in a printout with the first self/spouse correlations on the NEO Inventory (rs = .54—.68!), or when I plotted the personality profile of Telugu-speaking Indians and realized that it matched the profile of Marathi-speaking Indians. In the early 1980’s our analyses were run on a mainframe in Bethesda, but results came out on a line printer in Baltimore. When I ran the first factor analysis of the 80 adjective scales, I stipulated that the variables be reordered by factor, and when the printer started chugging along, Extraversion terms followed each other line after line, and then (in the second factor) Agreeableness terms, and so on. The FFM emerged from the printer like Venus rising from the waves.
As to a low point, I think many of us were disappointed by DSM-V. For a while it appeared that an empirically-based dimensional model of personality disorders would supplant an antiquated categorical model, but it didn’t happen—yet.
What career advice would you offer new researchers?
Get a full-time research position with a generous budget, an archive of longitudinal data for the picking, and talented and supportive collaborators. That worked for me. More realistically, new researchers are likely to have to work on topics that fit in with their academic position and have a reasonable chance of getting funding. But I would suggest that they also set aside some time for what is truly important to them, the kinds of questions that led them to seek a career as a personality psychologist. Their work on these issues is likely to be most personally fulfilling, and—sometimes—the basis for new directions in the field.
What are important but understudied topics in personality?
Right now I am intrigued by relations between personality traits and personality processes. Others are, too: Sarah Hampson recently wrote an Annual Review chapter on the topic. We know traits affect a host of outcomes, but we don’t really know how. Social psychologists study all kinds of processes and mechanisms, but they are not systematically related to traits. Traits are profound influences on psychopathology, but it is an understanding of personality processes that is likely to lead to effective therapies. This topic is huge, so it will remain relatively understudied for a long time.
When Dan McAdams answered this question for P (Issue 8, October 2013), he responded, “…we need to do more sophisticated research regarding the interface of personality and culture. Looking at Big Five scores across, say, 60 different societies is not enough – in fact, I am not sure that tells us much of anything about personality and culture.” What does the Big Five across cultures tell us about personality and culture?
Dan is correct in saying that simply knowing that average Openness scores are high in Switzerland and low in India doesn’t tell us much. But if we can show that there are features of culture that covary with levels of traits across a range of cultures (as Individualism does with Openness, for example), it suggests some causal link. Maybe some cultural institutions promote certain traits, or perhaps a concentration of people with specific traits leads to the development of characteristic institutions and customs (in a paper we wrote, Geert Hofstede and I agreed to disagree on which of these causal orders is more likely). Certainly an understanding of these kinds of associations will tell us a good deal about personality and culture.
Another issue concerns the unique expression of universal traits in different cultures—something I once dubbed intracultural studies of personality and culture. We do need more of those.
What are the most exciting developments in personality right now?
I have been heartened by the proliferation of a new generation of personality theories—grand theories—in the past few years, and I think one of the most exciting developments is the emergence of empirical tests of competing theories, through cross-cultural, behavior genetic, longitudinal, experimental, and comparative studies. Wiebke Bleidorn, Christian Kandler, Joshua Jackson, Brent Roberts, and Alex Weiss are some of the researchers actively taking on this most challenging task. Often Five-Factor Theory—the interpretation that Paul Costa and I make of findings on the FFM—is the foil in these studies, which certainly heightens their interest for me. I don’t see a preponderance of evidence in favor of any one theory right now, but I am excited that personality psychology is now taking seriously the dual tasks of trying to understand persons as a whole, and of testing these ideas scientifically.