It’s Time to Put Theories of Personality in Their Place, or, Allport and Stagner Got It Right, Why Can’t We?

Abstract

Among the various subfields of psychology, Personality is just about unique in its continued dedication to the teaching of courses and thus to the writing of textbooks devoted to “theory.” Where else, save perhaps in the closely allied field of Abnormal Psychology, can one find comparable courses and texts? Surely not in Cognitive or Biological Psychology, for example, and only with difficulty in Social Psychology. The contrast between the fates of Hilgard’s (1948) classic Theories of Learning and Hall and Lindzey’s (1957) comparably classic Theories of Personality is telling in this regard. The former, whose last edition was written a decade ago, can scarcely be considered representative of the current generation of textbooks in learning while the latter, in its most recent incarnation (Hall et al., 1985) (and with two additional authors), remains a leading textbook in the field. In what follows, I will be less concerned with the question of why this state of affairs exists than with the question of whether it is a desirable state of affairs. It should come as no surprise after so tendentious an opening that I intend to argue that the continued emphasis on theories of personality is not desirable, that it is both anachronistic and a misleading representation of what, in fact, personality psychologists think about and do.