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J.S. Tanaka Dissertation Award Invited Talk: Hierarchies in the Structure of Personality Traits
 “Why do people behave the way they do?” Some variant of that question forms the basis of nearly every psychologist's interests, and I am no different in that regard. However, from the beginning—although I might not have realized it initially—that question has implicitly been something more like: “Why does a given person behave the way they do?” This latter question is ultimately what has led me to identify with personality psychology in particular: a focus on individuals and their differences from one another. Over time, I also realized that, in order to answer the question of why individuals differ, you must answer the question of how they differ. As Quine and other philosophers have noted, the way you explain something is framed by how you define what it is you are trying to explain. Issues of how to define individual difference constructs—what the constructs fundamentally are, how you measure them, how you evaluate those measurements—become paramount. My interests in personality psychology actually began with anthropology and literature. As a teenager, I was introduced to the works of Joseph Campell by a wonderful English teacher, which led to an interest in Jungian theory, and in particular, the concepts of the personal and collective unconscious. I was captivated by the idea that a what constitutes an individual could be parsed into components that are shared with others and unique to themselves, and that very distant influences could have powerful, nuanced effects on one's experience and behavior. These interests led, in turn, to interests in evolutionary biology and genetics. As an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, I was involved with research on chimpanzee behavior through the Jane Goodall Institute, especially with a study of factors involved in the adjustment of chimpanzees to being orphaned. Understanding better how my experiences were shared not only with other persons, but with other animals, and how individual differences in primate behavior paralleled those in human behavior was fascinating. I loved coursework in molecular and population genetics, and became captivated by evolutionary psychology and the way individual differences could be shaped by subtle but powerful evolutionary forces over time, acting on genes. Eventually, I began to feel incomplete in the focus of evolutionary psychology—although it was elegant and powerful, its emphasis on distal influences did not seem to completely capture the diversity and complexity of individual behavior in the present, and adequately evaluating many of its theories seemed difficult. My interests became increasingly focused on more proximal influences, and shifted toward behavioral genetics, which I began to study in graduate school. After finishing my undergraduate degree and beginning graduate school, working with Nicki Crick on childhood aggression, as well as with Bob Krueger on personality and psychopathology, I became absorbed by psychometrics and statistical methodology. I realized at that time that psychological theory is only meaningful to the extent that it can operationalized, and the way that we quantify our theories and constructs has profound implications for what we conclude. An awareness that our conclusions are only as good as how we quantify our thinking seemed critical to me, and led to a love of statistics and psychometrics. The discipline of personality psychology has been, is, and will continue to be critically important to the discipline of psychology as a whole. Indeed, the basic premise that individuals differ reliably from one another—that it is possible to speak of behavioral features of an individual, as opposed to features of an individual's behavior at a particular time, or in particular circumstances—has not always been, and is not always, consensually accepted. Personality psychology as a field has been tremendously successful, not only in convincing psychology and the wider scientific community of the importance of assessment, or of accurate description of particular constructs, or of understanding the etiology of individual differences, but also, at a very fundamental level, of the importance of the individual itself, of the idea that the individual is a coherent target for empirical scientific inquiry. As science develops and evolves, areas of inquiry will change tremendously, across many disciplines, in ways that cannot be forseen. Personality psychology will likely always play an important role in these disciplines, however, by maintaining a focus on what characterizes an individual as a unique person, and how those factors come to do so. In this regard, my own research reflects a general interest in how to best model the causes and expression of individual variation, especially with regard to adaptive versus maladaptive functioning. I am primarily interested in how to statistically model observed genetic, environmental, and phenotypic variability in psychological traits, and how to make inferences about those models to understand the nature of psychological function versus dysfunction. Determining how to best model these variables is critically important in two ways. First, it helps to answer the question of how and why individuals adjust to their environment, and therefore, how to intervene to improve their circumstances. Second, it helps to answer more general questions about methodology, which has broader implications for how to quantify and evaluate theories in personality psychology, psychology more generally, and in other scientific domains. Many of these interests coincided in my dissertation, which provided an integrative hierarchical account of normal and abnormal personality trait structure. In this work, I outlined a common framework for understanding prominent Big Trait models found across the domains of normal and abnormal personality, such as the Big Two of Digman (1997); the Big Three models of Eysenck (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1976), Tellegen (2000), and others; the Big Four often found in studies of personality pathology (e.g., Widiger, 1998); and the Big Five. In a publication based on this work (Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005), it was shown that this structure replicates across different combinations of instruments, and in different samples. I hope to continue similar work on how to assess and quantify personality and its dysfunction at the University of Iowa, where I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.
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