An Interview with 2012 Jack Block Award Winner Dan McAdams
by Joshua Wilt
Why do you study personality?
I am interested in human nature, and the texture of individual human lives. “Personality” is the one concept in psychology that seems to encompass the big questions about human nature and individual lives. When I was an undergraduate student, my heroes in Psychology were mainly personality psychologists, or at least they studied the big questions about human nature and individual lives: Freud, Erikson, Murray, Ernest Becker. And I was drawn to philosophers and literary figures who addressed the same kinds of questions –especially Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky.
What is your most exciting discovery?
I don’t think I have a discovery. I mean, my students and I have hit upon some cool findings. In this regard, I am gratified that we have been able to document a close connection between the tendency to show high levels of generativity on the one hand and to construct a redemptive life story on the other. In American society, redemptive narratives of the self provide psychological resources for leading a life of caring and commitment in adulthood. But I guess I am more of a synthesizer and theorist than a “discoverer” of empirical facts. With that in mind, I see my contributions as two-fold. First, I have argued for many years that what Erik Erikson long ago called “identity” may be readily construed, at least in part, as an internalized and evolving story of the self – an ongoing narrative that reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to provide a person’s life with a sense of unity and purpose. Today, we call this idea narrative identity. The second thing is my ongoing effort to articulate a conceptual framework for understanding personality and the development of self. My current take on this is that we begin life as social actors, defined by the social roles and broad temperament traits that eventually make up our social reputations in the eyes of others (and in our own eyes). With the exception of openness, the Big Five essentially track our reputations as social actors. In grade school, we become motivated agents, too, as we formulate goals, plans, and values that layer over our dispositional traits. In adulthood, we eventually become autobiographical authors, as well, constructing an integrative life story (narrative identity), which layers over our goals and values, which in turn layer over our traits. In adulthood, personality comprises a unique patterning of traits, goals, and stories – the self as actor, agent, and author – situated in history and culture.
What is a high point in your career?
Winning the Jack Block prize last year for contributions to personality psychology was surely a high point. It is very gratifying to be recognized in that way. In terms of more intrinsic matters, however, a real high point for me was the 18-month period during which I wrote the bulk of my book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2006). I woke up every morning totally excited to begin work on the project. I loved writing that book. I felt that I was exploring really important ideas and discovering new connections between different fields of study. It was intellectually exhilarating. I was depressed when the writing ended, and I have never had a writing experience that good since.
What about a low point?
I have been blessed. Professionally speaking, I have not endured horrible low points. I did struggle a lot, though, early on in my career. Landing my first tenure-line job (Loyola University of Chicago, 1980) was really difficult. I came out of grad school with hardly any publications, and I was poorly socialized regarding professional issues – probably because I was so young and because my advisor in graduate school (David McClelland) did not consider professional socialization to be important. (In other ways, though, David was a fabulous advisor, and an inspiration.) I bombed a job interview at Brandeis, and a few years later at University of Chicago, and a few years after that at Purdue. I wanted the Chicago job really, really bad. Took me a couple of decades before I worked that all out, to tell you the truth. Every time I get a paper rejected by a journal, I feel it is the worse thing that has happened. I call my wife up and tell her I am going to quit – “They just don’t appreciate me ;” “Nobody gets what I am doing;” – I say stuff like that. She just laughs it off, and I usually feel back to normal within a day or two.
Usually you are on the other side of questions about high points and low points, and you have read thousands upon thousands of scenes from life stories. Given that you have just shared a small part of your life story pertaining to your career, how do you think that your own research has influenced how you construct your own life story?
I don't know. I have never been on the participant end of a life-story interview. For my overall life story, the high points, low points, and turning points are not typically about my career -- more about marriage and family issues, and other personal concerns. When I began research on life narratives in the 1980s, my sense was that people have very clear and readily demarcated episodes in their lives, and that these hold the key to narrative identity. I think my own life story -- as it was in my 20s and 30s -- contained clear scenes like that then. Today, though, things are a bit blurrier and harder to pin down, at least as far as my own life narrative is concerned. I tend now to think more in terms of chapters or plot lines in my own life story. Part of that is because I have experienced so many different events -- some really great, some not so -- that they tend to blur together now in my memory, more than was the case when I was younger and there were fewer scenes to keep track of. I also think that I have simply forgotten many details of earlier events, details that were very clear to me when I was younger. Having said that, there are still very vivid scenes that stand out in bold print in my own narrative identity. They tend to be from my late teens, 20s, and early 30s, in keeping with the research findings on the reminiscence bump.
Typically, a turning point scene follows narratives of a high point and low point scene in your life story interviews. Would you mind sharing a turning point in your career?
A turning point in my career was moving to Northwestern University from Loyola, in 1989. I went from a psychology department to an interdisciplinary program in Human Development and Social Policy (HDSP). (Now I am half in Psychology and half in HDSP, but when I started at NU it was all HDSP.) The entire ethos of HDSP was about culture, context, and life span development. Little interest among my colleagues in traditional personality psychology. My own research interests had already turned to life narratives, but it was not until I got to NU and immersed myself in the HDSP intellectual environment that I began to see how life stories are as much about society and culture as they are about the self. My colleagues in HDSP were very interested in how social institutions shape human lives. In order to connect to those interests, I decided to focus my attention on the life stories of highly generative midlife adults, because these are the kinds of men and women who are most meaningfully and deeply involved in some of the most important institutions in our society, such as schools, churches, and government. I received funding from the Spencer Foundation to launch a study of the life stories of especially generative teachers and community volunteers; a few years later I received more funding to examine the role of race in the construction of life stories and the performance of generativity. I became more of a life-span developmental psychologist, and maybe a little bit of a sociologist and cultural anthropologist at the same time. I never lost touch with my roots in personality psychology, however, but I did develop a broader perspective than I would have developed had I stayed in a psychology department.
Do you have any career advice for new researchers?
You have to strike a balance between being strategic and pursuing what you really love. In nearly every case, these two motives conflict. My sense is that many young scientists side with the strategic: In order to get pubs, they churn out as many studies as they can as fast as they can, adopting the most tried-and-true methods and taking on the easiest or safest topics – or the ones that are most fundable. When I get tenure, I will focus on my deepest passions, they say. But once they get tenure, the habits of mind have ossified, and they continue with the predictable program they have begun. I am exaggerating here to make a point. The point is that if you don’t carve out part of your intellectual life to pursue your passion early on, it will be very difficult to do it later. In my case, I worked on two tracks early in my career. I continued a relatively conservative line of research developed in my dissertation (building an empirical case for the construct validity of “intimacy motivation”), but at the same time I read widely (inside and outside of psychology), taught new seminars, and began doing exploratory interviews with people to develop nascent ideas regarding the nature of identity, which ultimately led to my life-story model of identity. It took nearly a decade of work on the life story model before I could publish a peer-reviewed empirical article on it. But eventually that second line of work became primary for me, along with research on generativity and related concepts. I have not done a study on intimacy motivation in 25 years.
What are some important but understudied topics in personality?
I am not sure I can point to topics, but I think that there are under-represented approaches. In particular, approaches that focus on the meaning and structure of a single life – case studies, idiographic approaches, psychological biography – have always been under-represented in personality psychology, even back in Allport’s day. I believe that personality psychologists should focus more attention on the patterning of traits, goals, and stories that comprise an individual life. I also think that 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.
Why do you think those approaches have received less attention, and what are some of the reasons that it is important for personality psychologists to study those approaches?
Idiographic, case-based research is labor- and time-intensive, and it tends not to be valued by the profession. Also, the rules or standards for high quality research in this domain are hard to articulate. Nonetheless, personality psychologists are better equipped than any other social scientists to shed light on the meaning and psychological structure of individual human lives. If we don't do this, who will? We certainly don't want to leave this task to the social psychologists, or journalists! At the end of the day, if our concepts and methods in personality science cannot help us understand individual lives, then how valuable are they?
What are some of the most exciting developments in personality psychology?
Well, this kind of question is always a projective test, and an opportunity to display narcissism. To those ends, I surely think that the research that my students and I do on life narrative, psychological biography, generativity, and culture represents an “exciting” development. I am also excited about most approaches to understanding personality, social, and developmental psychology that inquire into the evolutionary roots of human functioning. I am a huge fan of evo psych – not in the usual, let’s show-how-men-and-women-are-different-when-it-comes-to-sex-and-mating sort of thing, but rather evolutionary perspectives on the nature of our cognitively-gifted, exquisitely social species – which gets us to topics like altruism, attachment, aggression, social identification, religion, and the nature of political structures. Jonathan Haidt’s work is fascinating in this regard. Evolution and culture are the two great macrocontexts for personality. Sorting out the relations between evolution, culture, and personality presents a very exciting challenge for the future.