Personality psychology, which seeks to study individual differences in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that persist over time and place, has experienced a renaissance in the last few decades. It has also not been reviewed as a field in the Annual Review of Psychology since 2001.

In this article, we seek to provide an update as well as a meta-organizational structure to the field. In particular, personality psychology has a prescribed set of 4 responsibilities that it implicitly or explicitly tackles as a field: (1) describing what personality is—ie. what the units of analysis in the field are; (2) documenting how it develops; (3) explaining the processes of personality and why they affect functioning; and (4) providing a framework for understanding individuals and explaining their actions, feelings, and motivations.

We review progress made over the last 20 years to address these 4 agendas and conclude by highlighting future directions and ongoing challenges to the field.

[Keywords: personality, personality development, personality traits, motivation, skills, narrative identity]

…Historically, personality psychology was criticized because of empirical findings that were mistakenly thought to be of smaller magnitude than in most other areas of psychology (Mischel1968) [ie. Walter Mischel’s situationism]. The shared ethos was that personality traits and personality writ large lacked the levels of predictive validity that would make them matter.

Students of history will know that the personality correlation coefficient, r, was 0.30. The argument that this coefficient was low resulted from the fact that personality psychologists habitually reported effect sizes, whereas many other areas of psychology, especially in the 1960s, failed to report effect sizes at all. Personality psychology committed the sin of being too transparent. It is also the case that once the effects of these other areas were translated into the r metric, we found that most areas of psychology find coefficients lower than 0.30.

The perspective that personality was not an important predictor of important outcomes began to change because of industrial psychology, which concluded in the 1990s that personality traits did matter for outcomes like job performance (Barrick & Mount1991) and job satisfaction (Judge et al 2002). What followed were a series of studies, reviews, and meta-analyses that rendered a very clear picture. Personality traits and other personality constructs predict many important life outcomes, such as work success, relationship outcomes, well-being, mental health, and physical health (Caspi et al 2005, Ozer & Benet-Martinez2006), and they often do so at levels equal to gold standard predictors such as cognitive ability and socioeconomic status (Roberts et al 2007). Moreover, those predictive patterns tend to replicate at a far higher rate than many other findings in the psychological literature (Soto2019).

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