Psychology Commons^™

How Does Personality Develop?, Dan Mcadams, Jonathan Adler

Jonathan M. Adler

There are good reasons to be skeptical about any efforts to bring together two fields of inquiry that have historically had little to do with each other - that is, personality psychology and the study of human development. Personality psychologists are by training, and maybe even temperament, suspicious of the idea of development, for to them it means change (i.s. instability, inconsistency), and personality is nothing if it is not at least somewhat enduring. Developmentalists, on the other hand, specialize in a certain kind of change - meaningful and orderly change over time.