What Drives Adult Personality Development? A Comparison of Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Evidence

Abstract

Increasing numbers of empirical studies provide compelling evidence that personality traits change across the entire lifespan. What initiates this continuing personality development and how does this development proceed? In this paper, we compare six theoretical perspectives that offer testable predictions about why personality develops the way it does and identify limitations and potentials of these perspectives by reviewing how they hold up against the empirical evidence. While all of these perspectives have received some empirical support, there is only little direct evidence for propositions put forward by the five‐factor theory of personality and the theory of genotype → environment effects. In contrast, the neo‐socioanalytic theory appears to offer a comprehensive framework that fits the empirical findings and allows the integration of other, more specialized, perspectives that focus on specific aspects of personality development like the role of time, systematic differences between categories of social roles or the active partake of the person himself or herself. We draw conclusions on the likely driving factors for adult personality development and identify avenues for future research. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology

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“…The stability of PTs across ages and life events is a research question at length debated among psychologists (Boyce et al, 2013;Lucas and Donnellan, 2011;Roberts, 1997;Roberts and Del Vecchio, 2000;Specht et al, 2011Specht et al, , 2013Specht et al, , 2014 …”

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“…Although several theories address long-term personality development (see Specht et al, 2014, for a comparison of theoretical accounts of personality development), little is known about the underlying short-term processes that lead to long-term continuity and change (Durbin & Hicks, 2014;Roberts, 2009;Specht et al, 2014). We next offer a description of the TESSERA framework of personality development that links short-and long-term processes.…”

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“…Our approach focuses mostly on methodological aspects of the existing research. Therefore, readers who are interested in theoretical perspectives are encouraged to look at the work of, for example, Roberts and Mroczek [2], Specht et al [3], and Srivastava et al [4]. …”