Personality

Despite the fact that many scholars have offered formal definitions of personality for almost 100 years, no [Page 608]consensus on any single definition has been achieved. In fact, a survey of 50 textbooks devoted to the study of personality would quite likely result in 50 distinct definitions of the term. Perhaps the reason that scholars have not agreed on a single definition is because of the broad scope encompassed by the notion of human personality. Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray have suggested that human personality can be addressed at three distinct levels:

• 1.
  How we are like all other people
• 2.
  How we are like some other people
• 3.
  How we are like no other people

At the broadest level, Kluckhohn and Murray's framework suggests that there are some aspects of behavior that are common to all members of the human species. Murray, for example, in his classic taxonomy of needs, included a set of viscerogenic needs that are shared by all people. This category of needs, representing those things that humans need to survive, includes the need for air, the need for water, and the need for heat avoidance. Likewise, Abraham Maslow, in his specification of the hierarchy of needs, suggested that an individual's psychological needs could not be addressed unless the basic physiological (e.g., food, water) and safety (e.g., security, avoidance of pain) needs were met.

At the second level—the way we are like some other people—Kluckhohn and Murray suggested that, when considering specific aspects of personality, individuals will share similarities with some but not all people. Within contemporary personality psychology, this level of personality description is where the notion of personality traits resides. Traits can be defined as characteristic behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of an individual that tend to occur across diverse situations and are relatively stable over time. A trait, once identified, is something that all people possess, but to differing degrees. For example, although all people can be described in terms of their extroversion, some people are outgoing and social, whereas others tend to be more introverted and reserved. Thus in a trait we can be said to be like some other people.

At the third level of personality description is how we are like no other people. This level of explanation includes those aspects of our personality that make us unique individuals. As such, this level includes the experiences we have had in our own histories that have shaped the way we think, feel, and act. In his writings about this level of personality description, Daniel P. McAdams has suggested that the goal of studying personality at this level is to understand individuals in the context of their personal life stories.