This chapter begins with two nonintuitive assertions.
The first is this: Personality is (in part) a life story. This is a stronger claim than it may seem on first blush. The position is not merely that people’s personalities influence what happens in their lives—a claim that probably nobody would dispute. Nor is it limited to the notion that the stories people tell about their lives are reflections of personality factors and processes—that, in effect, personality influences how people construct stories about their lives. Instead, the assertion goes further to claim that personality itself—or to be more precise, one layer or feature of personality—assumes the form of an internalized and dynamic narrative of the self. People are walking around with stories in their minds about how they came to be the unique people they believe they are becoming. Personality psychologists call these stories narrative identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Along with things like dispositional traits and personal goals, narrative identity is part and parcel of personality itself (McAdams & Pals, 2006; Singer, 2005).
The second assertion is this: People are not the (sole) authors of their “own” life stories. Instead, culture shapes the narrative in determinative ways. The second claim supersedes the observation that culture provides the raw materials out of which individuals fashion their distinctive narrative identities. Culture provides a menu of story options for sure, and people pick and choose from the menu, mix and match, when making sense of their own lives. But culture also does more. Culture sets the parameters for what kinds of stories can be told and affirmed in society, and even for how a human life itself may be imagined to unfold.
In defining the term “culture,” we adopt a disarmingly simple but highly elastic conception, put forth in Hammack and Toolis (2015): Culture is “a system of shared meaning made manifest in social practice” (p. 404). In that meaning is shared, culture always suggests a group or community who create, invoke, and live according to the norms, values, beliefs, customs, and practices set forth in culture. But not every member of a group, community, or organization appropriates “shared” meaning in the same way. Therefore, culture is not to be equated with any particular group in and of itself; nor is it synonymous with related conceptions such as race, ethnicity, nationality, or geographic location. In that human beings are moral animals who live in structured groups, cultural meanings are laden with value and ideology. Culture tells us what is right and what is wrong, how we should live, how we should think, and what we should feel, want, love, and hate. Culture tells us how we should live together in groups. As such, culture sets forth norms and expectations regarding authority within the group (and vis-à-vis rival groups). Culture invokes and legitimates implicit assertions regarding power, hierarchy, and subjugation: Who holds the power? Who is subject to whom?
When it comes to the composition of a life story, then, the person and the person’s culture function as coauthors of narrative identity (Freeman, 2010; McLean, 2016). The authorial partnership may be congenial, or it may be fraught with tension. In some cases, the person’s experience of life and the world seems to conform readily to cultural expectations. In many other instances, however, cultural forces may crush, oppress, or distort the life longings of individual storytellers. In co-authorship, both partners display formidable strengths: the person pushes back with the power of human agency as culture relentlessly imposes hegemonic frameworks of meaning. Consequently, the question of who should ultimately claim first or primary authorship (and responsibility) for the life story—whether the person or the person’s culture ultimately comes out on top—continues to fascinate and perplex social theorists and other keen observers of human nature.
The most important advance in the field of personality psychology over the past three decades has been the consolidation of the trait concept. Whereas critics once called into question the very existence of personality traits (e.g., Shweder, 1975), the empirical evidence for the efficacy of traits in human lives is now overwhelming. Individual differences in dispositional personality traits, like extraversion and conscientiousness, show remarkable longitudinal stability, as well as meaningful developmental change (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). Traits are reliably associated with consistent patterns of behavior and feeling, especially when aggregated over situations and across time (Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009). Additionally, individual differences in traits predict important life outcomes like psychological well-being, physical health, occupational success, marital happiness, and mortality (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007).
Now that the dispositional trait is firmly established as a bedrock construct in human personality, psychological scientists have begun to ask a new question: What else does personality include? Among the many kinds of constructs nominated for inclusion are individual differences in goals, values, ideologies, schemas, scripts, interests, abilities, and internalized narratives of the self. McAdams and Pals (2006) proposed that personality constructs may be grouped into three basic categories: (1) dispositional traits of the sort organized in the Big Five taxonomy, (2) goals, values, and other characteristic adaptations, which tend to be motivational constructs that are contextualized in time and space or with respect to social roles, and (3) integrative life stories. Most recently, McAdams (2015a; McAdams & Olson, 2010) has followed three lines of development in personality over the human life course: (1) the development of the social actor, which traces the transformation of infant temperament dimensions into adult personality traits, (2) the development of the motivated agent, from childhood understandings of human intentionality through the consolidation of life goals and values, and (3) the development of the autobiographical author, from the emergence of autobiographical memory to the construction of a life story. The focus in this chapter is on that third line.
The third line of personality development culminates in the adult articulation of a narrative identity. In order to provide their lives with some semblance of temporal continuity and thematic purpose, many adults construct and internalize dynamic life stories that explain how they have come to be the unique persons they are becoming. Narrative identity is the adult’s internalized and evolving reconstruction of the personal past and projection of an imagined future. This broad narrative explains to the narrator and to the narrator’s world how the self of yesterday became the self of today, and how the self of today will become the imagined self of the future (McAdams, 1985; McAdams & McLean, 2013).
Within the field of personality psychology, researchers who have studied narrative identity typically ask their participants to provide open-ended narrative accounts of important experiences in their lives (McAdams & Manczak, 2015). In some studies, researchers focus on just a few key narrative scenes—such as a life-story high point or turning point event, or a particular memory that stands out as especially vivid or self-defining (Singer & Salovey, 1993). In more comprehensive studies, researchers may engage participants in a wide-ranging life-story interview (McAdams, 1993; McAdams & Guo, 2015), wherein they are asked to outline the main chapters in their life stories, describe a series of key scenes, imagine what the future may hold, and respond to a series of open-ended prompts regarding characters, conflicts, and themes in the story. Narrative accounts are typically transcribed into written texts, and then researchers code or analyze the texts for any of a number of validated constructs. Among the most commonly studied constructs are themes of agency and communion in life stories, sequences of redemption and contamination, and variables related to emotional tone, integrative complexity, meaning making, and narrative coherence (McAdams & Manczak, 2015).
A number of studies have examined relations between life-narrative constructs on the one hand and other dimensions of personality such as traits and motives on the other. For example, early studies on life stories documented thematic continuities between power and intimacy motivation on the one hand and respective life-narrative themes of agency and communion on the other (McAdams, 1985; McAdams, Hoffman, Mansfield, & Day, 1996). Research suggests that individuals high in dispositional neuroticism tend to construct stories about their lives that exhibit more negative emotion, less positive emotion, less growth, and less emphasis on attitudes and perspectives about the outside world (Bauer, McAdams, & Sakaeda, 2005; Raggatt, 2006). Openness to experience is associated with telling especially complex stories, containing multiple plots and distinctions, and with higher levels of thematic coherence (McAdams et al., 2004; McLean & Fournier, 2008). Whereas some studies suggest significant associations between narrative constructs (Layer 3 in personality) and dispositional personality traits (Layer 1), the relationships are not so robust however as to suggest that the two kinds of constructs are getting at the same underlying thing. In addition, a number of studies have shown that individual differences in narrative indices predict variation in valued life outcomes, such as happiness and psychological well-being, even after accounting for the statistical effects of dispositional personality traits (e.g., Bauer et al., 2005; Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011).
The issue of culture is foregrounded in life-narrative studies on religion and politics (Gregg, 1991). Religious and political systems invoke some of the strongest cultural meanings to be found in human societies. With cultural meanings in mind, McAdams and colleagues conducted a series of studies exploring the full life stories of 128 highly religious midlife American adults, all Christian, who differed substantially on political values and beliefs (Hanek, Olson, & McAdams, 2011; McAdams & Albaugh, 2008; McAdams et al., 2008; McAdams, Hanek, & Dadabo, 2013). Providing empirical support for new theories of political ideology developed by Lakoff (2002) and Haidt (2007), the findings showed that Christian political conservatives in the United States tend to emphasize themes of strict-father morality in their life stories and prioritize values linked to authority, loyalty, and sacredness. By contrast, Christian political liberals tend to emphasize themes of nurturing-caregiver morality and prioritize values linked to alleviating harm and promoting fairness.
Adopting a distinction from Molden, Lee, and Higgins (2008), the findings from these studies also suggested that conservatives adopt a prevention-focus perspective on their own lives, telling cautionary tales about self-discipline, control, and avoiding trouble in life. By contrast, liberals tend to adopt a promotion-focus perspective, privileging the discourse of growth, development, and approaching rewards. For principled conservatives who are devoted to a Christian religious tradition, life is a commitment story of overcoming chaos, struggling to keep impulses under control to establish and maintain authority and social harmony. God and government function to protect the self in the minds of Christian conservatives (unless they are completely libertarian in orientation), acting as agents of social control, keepers of the peace. For equally religious and principled political liberals, by contrast, life is ideally a narrative of fulfillment, filling up the emptiness they sometimes sense, developing and expanding the self and encouraging others to do the same. As the Christian liberals narrate it, God and government provide nourishment for the self, the bread of life that enables the self to grow and flourish.
Theory and research suggest that the life story becomes a salient feature of personality in the emerging adult years (Arnett, 2000; Habermas & Bluck, 2000). But its psychological origins may be traced to early childhood. In the third and fourth years of human life, children begin to attach simple episodic memories to the self (Fivush, 2011). The child may recall yesterday’s drive to grandma’s house as an event in which “I” (the child) played a role. “I sat in the back seat and fought with my brother. I remember it today—my memory about me.” The child may tell the autobiographical memory to others, as a simple story. By the time children are 5 or 6 years of age, most seem to know that these kinds of tellings, like many stories, follow a certain canonical form: the main character (an intentional agent) wants something (has a goal) and pursues it; other agents in the environment respond in turn; over time, things happen and the situation resolves (the goal may be achieved or squelched; the event ends). Parents, teachers, and other socializing agents may help the child tell the story, encouraging the child’s halting memory, filling in details when the child falters, and so on. As such, studies of parent-child conversations show broad individual differences in the kinds of support parents provide. Some parents show an elaborative reminiscing style, actively prompting the child to provide many details of the remembered event and to explore his or her feelings about the event, whereas other parents elicit less elaboration. Elaborative styles in parents are associated with the production of richer and more vivid autobiographical stories on the part of children (Reese & Newcomb, 2007).
Some researchers have argued that the early influence of culture can be seen in studies of parent-child conversations and storytelling. These studies typically compare child-rearing patterns in different societies, or among different ethnic groups within a particular society. The most common comparison is between families assumed to be under the sway of individualistic cultural norms, as is often assumed to be the case for much of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada and those subject to more collectivist norms, as is often associated with Japan, China, and Korea. Critics of this approach have noted that there is wide variation in cultural expressions within all of these societies, and they caution against simplistic essentialist contrasts between “West” and “East” (Hammack, 2014; Okazaki, in press). Nonetheless, most readers of the scientific literature on culture and personality believe that studies of this type may, at minimum, be instructive.
Research has shown that Euro-American middle-class caregivers tend to engage in highly elaborative conversations with their children, privileging the child’s voice and personal experience. By contrast, caregivers in many societies that may hold to a more collectivist (as opposed to individualist) cultural ethic may give less credence to the child’s personal feelings and thoughts, encouraging the child, instead, to listen more carefully to the stories of others or to use autobiographical storytelling as an opportunity to learn a life lesson. Accordingly, North American adults typically report an earlier age of first memory and have longer, more detailed memories of childhood than do Chinese, Japanese, and Korean adults (Leichtman, Wang, & Pillemer, 2003). Studies also show that North American children’s personal memories tend to be more self-focused than are the memories of East Asian children (Chang & McCabe, 2013). Wang and Conway (2004) found that whereas European Americans tend to recall autobiographical memories of individual experiences and one-time events, Chinese adults recall more memories of social and historical events and more frequently drew on past events to underscore moral truths. They argued that the autobiographical memories of European Americans prioritize self-expression whereas those told by Chinese may often convey moral messages about how to live well with others.
Confucian traditions in China place a great deal of emphasis on history and respect for the past. Individuals are encouraged to learn from the experiences of others, including their ancestors. From a Confucian perspective, the highest purpose in life is ren—a blending of benevolence, moral vitality, and sensitive concern for others. One method for promoting ren is to scrutinize one’s autobiographical past for mistakes in social conduct. Another method is to reflect upon historical events to understand one’s appropriate position in society. It should not be surprising, then, that personal narratives imbued with a Confucian ethic employ the use of both individual and historical events to derive directions for life.
The stories children tell reflect a culture’s guidelines for the socialization of motivation and emotion. Again, comparisons between North American individualist cultures and the collectivist cultures of East Asia are instructive. A large body of research demonstrates that, on average, North Americans tend to be more highly motivated to engage in self-enhancement than are East Asians (Heine & Buchtel, 2009). Accordingly, autobiographical accounts provided by American children tend to be more detailed and more self-promoting than are the corresponding accounts of their Chinese and Korean peers (Reese, 2013). Whereas the stories told by American children tend to emphasize the pursuit of positive rewards for the self, those told by Chinese and Korean children often place more focus on the avoidance of negative states (Heine & Buchtel, 2009). When describing positive events in their lives, American children tend to maximize expressions of positive emotion whereas East Asian children are more likely to blend positive and negative emotions in the same story. The juxtaposition of positive and negative emotions in the same narrative account may indicate an East Asian penchant for dialectical thinking, which may allow for the expression of contradictions and opposites (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006).
Even when narrating positive emotion and positive emotion only, there would appear to be cultural differences in the kinds of positive emotions that are preferred. Many scholars have argued that North Americans are socialized to prefer high-arousal positive emotions, such as excitement. By contrast, East Asians learn to prefer low-arousal positive emotions, such as feelings of tranquility (Tsai et al., 2006). Best-selling children’s storybooks in the United States are saturated with accounts of excitement and intense joy and the corresponding storybooks in Japan, by contrast, feature significantly more instances of calmness, peace, and serenity.
Influenced by family, friends, teachers, storybooks, and a wide range of cultural sources, children gradually learn how a human life in their society is supposed to unfold. By early adolescence, many individuals have internalized a culturally mediated biographical script (Thomsen & Bernsten, 2008). The script encodes developmental milestones and expectations about when and how things can or should happen over the course of life—when and how, for example, schooling transpires, a person leaves home, jobs develop, people get married, children are born, adults retire, and so on. An upper-middle-class White boy living in San Francisco may imagine that he will obtain an advanced degree before he even begins to think about choosing a long-term mate; a Catholic girl raised in a poor Peruvian village may expect to bear children during her teen-aged years; and an African American gang member in inner-city Baltimore may figure that he could be dead before the age of 30, or in prison. Adolescents begin to imagine how their lives will be similar to and different from the biographical scripts that prevail in their respective cultures.
Cognitive advances in the adolescent years help to jumpstart the process of constructing a self-defining narrative identity, within the constraints and opportunities offered in a given society. Over developmental time, adolescents become more adept at stringing together autobiographical memories into causal chains, in order to explain how their past experiences have resulted in what they perceive themselves to be at the current time (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). They also become better able to derive explanatory themes, life lessons, and personal insights from their personal experiences (McLean & Pratt, 2006). In general terms, adolescents hone the cognitive skills associated with autobiographical reasoning, allowing them to build stories out of and draw personal meanings from their autobiographical experiences (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McLean & Fournier, 2008). These stories are shared with parents, peers, and others, according to cultural norms for personal storytelling. In cultural context, then, adolescents perform their stories for each other, as narrators and audiences, and the responses they receive feed back to influence future performances, reinforcing certain images and plots, discouraging others, as each narrator gradually discovers which stories work best and which ones fail. Along the way, they discover what kinds of narratives feel right and authentic and what kinds feel wrong or phony, and what forms of storytelling bring about the most desirable interpersonal and social effects (McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007).
The gradual emergence of an internalized life story in the adolescent and emerging adult years is part of a larger process of identity development, first described in detail by Erikson (1963). Among the many functions of identity, Erikson argued, is the consolidation of a sense of inner sameness and continuity. Identity affirms for the young person that he or she continues to be the same person, in some fundamental sense, from one situation to the next and (importantly) over time. A sense of temporal continuity can derive from something as simple as a trait attribution (“I am an extravert—always have been and always will be”) or as dynamic as a life story of personal transformation (“I was once a born-again Christian but now I am a secular humanist; here is how it happened …”). Both personal and cultural factors may influence what kinds of self-construction strategies people rely upon in construing temporal continuity in the self (Chandler, 2000; McAdams & Zapata-Gietl, 2015). For example, Dunlop and Walker (2015) found that immigrant Asian Canadians composed relatively complex autobiographical narratives when asked to explain identity continuity over time, whereas nonimmigrant Euro Canadians told simpler stories and tended to rely more heavily on the attribution of stable personal traits.
There is a sense in which the very construction of a life story depends on the affirmation of human selfhood that accompanies what sociologists and historians term cultural modernity (Giddens, 1991; Taylor, 1989). Whereas storytelling is an ancient practice that appears in all human cultures, the idea that individual human lives may readily assume a narrative form and that individual human beings may “have” stories, or “make” stories about their lives, would appear to be a cultural construction that resonates well with the sensibilities of the modern world. Giddens (1991) writes, “A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor – important though this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going” (p. 54). Amidst the constant change and indeterminacy of the modern world, Giddens argues, people no longer rely solely on such authoritative sources as the church (or parents) to define who they are. Nor do modern adults see themselves as completely consonant with the cultural and ethnic groups to which they belong. Modern identity transcends the collectives with which the self identifies to incorporate a self-defining life narrative. Under the aegis of cultural modernity, we are our stories, as much as we are anything else.
Still, within contemporary modern societies, different groups are given different narrative opportunities and face dissimilar narrative constraints. Especially relevant here are class, gender, and race/ethnicity divisions, as well as issues of immigration, citizenship, and nationality. Studies of social class differences, for example, have shown that working-class children and adolescents learn to narrate their lives with a greater sense of humility and vigilance, compared to their middle-class peers. According to one set of researchers, “the working class slant encourages children to see that they have the right and resources to narrate their own experiences in self-dramatizing ways, but that the right to be heard and to have one’s point of view accepted cannot be taken for granted” (Miller, Cho, & Bracey, 2005, p. 115). In Writing a Woman’s Life, the late feminist author Carolyn Heilbrun (1988) remarked that many women have traditionally “been deprived of the narratives, or texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over – take control of – their own lives” (p. 17). The historical and contemporary life experiences of many African Americans do not always coalesce easily into the kind of life-narrative forms favored by the White majority in the United States (Boyd-Franklin, 1989). Narrative identity, therefore, invariably reflects structural and cultural boundaries in society and the patterns of economic, political, and cultural hegemony that prevail at a given point in a society’s history (Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992).
The intersection of personal narrative and culture is on vivid display in research examining the life stories told by highly generative American adults at midlife (McAdams, 2006; McAdams & Bowman, 2001; McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997; McAdams & Guo, 2015; McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001). Erikson (1963) identified generativity to be the prime psychosocial challenge of the midlife years. He defined generativity as an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations as evidenced in parenting, teaching, mentoring, leadership, and other behaviors aimed at leaving a positive legacy of the self for the future (McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992). Adults who score high on self-report measures of generativity show more effective parenting strategies, higher levels of civic engagement, more community volunteerism, better leadership skills, more extensive friendship networks, and higher levels of psychosocial adaptation more generally, compared to adults scoring lower in generativity (see McAdams, 2013, for a recent review). Yet generativity is risky, and it is hard work. A midlife adult’s best efforts to leave a positive mark on the world can often fail. As a response, highly generative midlife adults may construct life stories that function to provide narrative support and sustenance for their strenuous efforts in generativity. One might expect, therefore, that the particular kinds of life stories composed by adults scoring high on self-report measures of generativity should differ markedly from the stories composed by those scoring low.
McAdams et al. (1997) compared the life stories told by highly generative and less generative midlife adults. Taking cues from qualitative studies of moral exemplars (e.g., Colby & Damon, 1992), they identified a suite of five themes that reliably distinguished between the two sets of stories: (1) early advantage (the protagonist enjoys a positive distinction early in the story), (2) suffering of others (the protagonist shows an early sensitivity to others’ pain and/or societal injustices), (3) moral steadfastness (the protagonist establishes a clear and consistent set of religious, political, or social values), (4) redemption sequences (negative events in the protagonist’s life often lead to positive outcomes or insights), and (5) prosocial goals (the protagonist aims to achieve positive social goals in the future). Because of the central role of redemption sequences in the narrative, McAdams (2006) named this kind of story the redemptive self, referring to an idealized narrative prototype that tends to map more closely on to the life stories told by highly generative American adults, compared to their less generative counterparts. Subsequent studies have shown that the redemptive self is positively associated with generativity, positive civic engagement, and overall psychosocial well-being among American midlife adults (McAdams & Bowman, 2001; McAdams & Guo, 2015).
It is clear why narrating one’s life as a redemptive story might support a highly generative life. A story that juxtaposes the idea that the protagonist is special and good (early advantage) with the early realization that the world is a dangerous place (suffering of others) sets up a moral challenge for the protagonist. Because the protagonist is fortunate and the world is in need, the protagonist may feel that it is his or her duty or mission to make a positive difference in the world. Equipped with a strong and steady value system (moral steadfastness), the protagonist sets out to leave a positive legacy. Moreover, the regular appearance of redemption sequences in the life story bolsters the protagonist’s confidence that the hardships and failures that invariably accompany generative efforts may someday pay off. If my story tells me that bad things usually lead to good outcomes, then I may be well situated, psychologically speaking, to soldier on in my generative efforts.
What is less clear at first glance is how the idealized narrative prototype captured in the redemptive self reprises central, and in some cases highly contested, cultural themes in American history, literature, and heritage. McAdams (2006) argued it is no accident that this kind of life story tends to be told by highly generative American adults. He traced the same five themes that comprise the redemptive self through such canonical texts in American history as the spiritual testimonials of 17th century Puritans, classic American autobiographies such as the celebrated example of Benjamin Franklin, the sermons on self-reliance delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th century narratives of escaped African American slaves, Horatio Alger success stories, and such 20th century examples as American self-help books, motivational speeches, and the Oprah Winfrey television show. McAdams (2006) identified at least four favorite American versions of the redemptive self: stories of atonement (from sin to salvation), upward mobility (from rags to riches), personal liberation (from slavery/oppression to freedom), and recovery (from sickness, addiction, or abuse to the full realization of one’s good inner self). Whereas highly generative American adults may believe that they are the sole authors of their narrative identities, they may instead be drawing upon cultural plots, themes, and images that are as American as Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Super Bowl.
The redemptive self puts into psychological form broad cultural motifs with which Americans are deeply familiar, so familiar that they may rarely question the validity of the themes. Indeed, a close reading of autobiographies written by recent U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama reveals striking similarities to the redemptive self (McAdams, 2011, 2015b). American voters value redemptive stories told by political candidates. In a related vein, Kleinfeld (2012) describes the frontier romance of Alaskan identity as a variation on the redemptive self. For highly generative American adults, the coupling of early advantage and suffering of others generates a deep conviction regarding the protagonist’s manifest destiny to make a positive difference in the world. It is as if the protagonist has been called by a higher power, or at least by life circumstances, to live out an exceptional life, a psychological variation writ small on what historians have identified as the broad phenomenon of American exceptionalism.
The story of the redemptive self may be inspiring, but it can also be limiting, reflecting well-known critiques of conventional American sensibilities. Certain versions of the redemptive self, therefore, may be critiqued for the prevalence of self-righteousness and moral imperialism and for the naïve conviction that all bad things may eventually be redeemed (McAdams, 2006). As psychologically uplifting as redemptive narratives may be, they may, at the same time, reflect what Koopmann-Holm and Tsai (2014) have noted as a characteristic American aversion to acknowledging real negative consequences of negative life events.
At the same time, it is fair to say that most people living in the world today aspire to turn negative events into positive outcomes. Stories of overcoming suffering are a staple in many different cultures. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902/1958) went so far as to assert that all the world’s great religions promise a “certain uniform deliverance”from an initial “sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand” to a subsequent “solution” whereby “we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers” (p. 383, italics in original). In other words, people are bad and wont to suffer in their natural state, but the higher powers of a transcendent world can deliver them to a better place. Therefore, variations on the broad idea of redemption may be observed in societies worldwide.
McAdams (2006), however, argues that very few other societies magnify the idea of redemption to the extent that America has, enshrining it as a cultural truism and articulating such a rich and varied canon of cultural meanings, as reflected in everything from the U.S. Constitution to this week’s issue of People magazine. Accordingly, future research should pursue the question of what kinds of narrative identities promote generativity and other positive life outcomes among adults of different cultural backgrounds, living in different societies. And it should examine the ways in which those life stories draw upon the broader narratives that define a culture’s unique way of making meaning in the world.
The redemptive self is an example of what the cultural psychologist Phillip Hammack (2008) calls a master narrative of culture. Hammack (2008) defines a master narrative as “a cultural script that is readily accessible to members of a particular axis of identity, whether that be a nation, an ethnic group, or a gender” (p. 235). A master narrative conveys how a particular identity constituency has traditionally construed its own history and the expected life history of its individual members. As such, a master narrative conveys an ideological message that both validates the group’s identity and sets forth what counts as a good and praiseworthy life for the individual. In the case of the redemptive self, the master narrative affirms the values of autonomy, freedom, empathy, optimism, resilience, steadfast conviction, hard work, upward striving, giving back to others, and the sense that some people (and indeed some groups or nations) are specially chosen to do good things in the world. Many midlife American adults are motivated to shape their life stories in accord with the redemptive self, for they aspire to live a life that exemplifies the values inherent in the master narrative. Any given society may have a range of different master narratives. In American society, therefore, the redemptive self is one especially salient story about how to live a good life in America (though there are certainly others), one that seems to hold special appeal to many men and women in the midlife years.
Master narratives are particularly visible in cases of cultural assimilation. Members of Group A desire to become (or find that they must become) members of Group B, and they do so by appropriating the master narratives Group B holds dear. In her book Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience, the sociologist Carolyn Chen (2008) describes the cultural transitions that traditionally secular Taiwanese immigrants make when they come to California and join Taiwanese-American churches. By becoming observant Christians, the immigrants become American, Chen argues. The churches provide a panoply of resources and activities—from Sunday afternoon dinners to English language classes—that help the immigrants acclimate to the new setting. They also provide a moral community within which new life narratives may be imagined and expressed. “Taiwanese immigrants narrate their religious conversions as freedom from traditional Taiwanese expectations that prevent them from being who they really are,” Chen (2008, p. 111) writes (italics added). Appropriating a new master narrative, the immigrants come to see their lives as redemptive tales of liberation, stories of escaping what is now perceived to be the oppressive family duties of traditional Taiwanese life in order to discover their own unique, authentic selves, in the spirit of such American icons as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oprah Winfrey.
Master narratives of culture may also come into clear focus in cases of cultural conflict. Hammack (2009, 2011) has paid special attention to how individual stories may sometimes reproduce those features of master narratives that perpetuate conflict between different groups. His case in point is the long-running conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Hammack notes that the citizens of the state of Israel and the Palestinian people who were displaced by its founding hold to dramatically different master narratives regarding the meaning of recent historical events. For the Israelis, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 marked a redemptive conclusion to unparalleled suffering. Their master narrative tells how 6 million innocent Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust of World War II and how these resilient people rallied to establish their own promised land after the war. The master narrative commemorates the horror they endured and celebrates the subsequent triumph of a democratic and enlightened nation.
By contrast, Palestinians refer to the events of 1948 as al-Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe” (Hammack, 2014). As many as 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the first Arab-Israeli war. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were later displaced by the war of 1967, with some becoming refugees twice over. Their master narrative is about peace-loving people who were ruthlessly uprooted from their homeland. It is a contamination story (McAdams & Bowman, 2001), tracking a sudden transformation from positive to negative while holding to the desperate hope for a reversal.
Through intensive interviews of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, Hammack (2009, 2011) has examined how individual life stories relate to master narratives. He has found a consistent tendency for the stories of Israeli youth to match the upward trajectory of their culture’s master narrative and for the stories of Palestinian youth to show the same downward spiral that is conveyed in stories of “the catastrophe.” When Israeli youth in Hammack’s study envisioned the time line of their own lives—from childhood past to adult future—they tended to envision an upward, redemptive arc; in contradistinction, Palestinian youth imagined their own lives as downwardly mobile, declension narratives. Childhood may have been happy, but things were beginning to get worse, the Palestinian adolescents suggested, and they would likely continue downhill in the future.
In the year or two following Hammack’s interviews, the same Israeli and Palestinian youth came to the United States to participate in an intensive program designed to encourage friendship and understanding between the two groups. In the short term, the program seemed to be a success. Through sharing stories of their experiences and engaging in group activities, the young people developed close bonds across the two groups. Israeli youth reported enhanced empathy for the plight of their new Palestinian friends. Palestinian youth reported greater appreciation for the strengths and the experiences of their new Israeli friends. Members of both groups resolved to work on enhancing tolerance and mutual understanding when they returned home.
A year or two later, Hammack reinterviewed many of the youth. To his dismay, he found that the promise of the peace-making program had not been realized. Although the young people had sincere intentions when they returned to their homeland, most eventually hardened their attitudes, with some becoming even less tolerant of the other group than they were before they entered the program. Back at home, the old influences of family and friends gradually overwhelmed the more accepting attitudes they had developed in the program. Moreover, the master cultural narratives of their respective groups proved to be paramount. In Hammack’s (2011) view, the discordant master narratives of Israelis and Palestinians not only produce sharply different narrative identities for individual members of their respective groups but also perpetuate intergroup conflict.
So vividly apparent in the case of the Israelis and Palestinians, master narratives often assert a set of values and themes that are understood to be in direct opposition to those of a rival group. Central, then, to the ideology of a group may be a group’s stance toward another group (Hammack, 2008). In many cases, opposing groups may be in contact (and/or conflict) with each other for a very long time. “As a result of centuries of mutual contact,” writes Gjerde (2004), “individuals/cultures have in many cases dialectically constructed each other. Cultural, national, or ethnic identities require comparison with others. In this sense, [narrative] identities are always indeterminate, depending on who is perceived as the Other” (p. 148).
A prime contemporary example of Gjerde’s point, especially notable in current psychological research on cultural differences, is the dualism of East (collectivism) versus West (individualism) (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Gjerde (2004) offers the provocative assertion that there may not be anything inherently collectivistic about East Asian culture or individualistic about the mainstream culture of North America. Instead, the two opposing worldviews have been constructed dialectically, in relation to each other. Thus, East Asian societies are viewed to be relatively collectivistic when positioned against the West. But other kinds of positionings (e.g., North versus South, rich versus poor, European versus American, Japanese versus Korean) would likely lead to very different psychological conceptions of cultural groups.
At the cultural level, positioning involves an imaginative apprehension of the Other. In the landmark volume Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) argued that the 20th-century European and American apprehension of Middle Eastern and North African cultures originated with, and reinforced, a stark differential in power. From the hegemonic position of Western culture, the Arab world was viewed to be both inferior and exotic, projected essentialist identities that served to justify Western imperialism. In the Western mind, Said wrote, Arab culture was romantic and irrational, in opposition to Western reason, and weak-willed and feminized, in opposition to decisive Western masculinity. As such, the Orient was/is in need of the civilizing influence that Western democracies were/are, according to their own master narratives, uniquely positioned to provide.
Whereas Said’s (1978) cultural analysis transformed the fields of cultural studies and Middle Eastern history, the implications for the study of personality, narrative, and culture are also apparent. In The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology, Gary Gregg (2005) enumerates a list of myths and misunderstandings that many Western scholars continue to hold about the Middle East. These include the ideas that despotism and strife stem from an Arab tribal mentality, that Arab men will never be able to modernize because they are trapped by a code of honor, and that terrorism springs from a vein of fanaticism that is inherent in the Arab psyche. On a more molecular level, Hammack (2009) observes that even the most cosmopolitan and politically progressive young Israelis cannot help but “Orientalize” the Palestinians. Even when they express empathy for the Palestinian youth, their descriptions of their Palestinian counterparts emphasize the exotic and the inferior: their ennobling emotions, for example, rather than their intellect.
On the other side of the globe, Moore (2015) contrasts the master narratives developed by two different identity constituencies in the Pacific Islands near Australia. In the 19th century, many Pacific Islanders were transported to Queensland, Australia to work on sugarcane farms. Australian historians acknowledge that in the early years of this migration, many laborers were coerced into leaving their island homes. Over time, however, a growing number of Pacific Islanders chose to make the trip because of the economic opportunities that arose in Queensland. A century later, Pacific Islanders who ultimately settled in Australia, as well as many who never left, have developed a master narrative that is completely at odds with what others believe to be the historical record. Theirs is a story of kidnapping and slavery, which resulted in a tragic diaspora. Moore describes how the two groups—Australian historians and the people about whom the history is being written—are positioned in opposition to each other. From the position of the historians, the many successes enjoyed by the immigrants who left the Pacific Islands, as well as the redemptive master narrative that prevails in Queensland itself, shape a story of immigrant agency and upward mobility. But from the position of the contemporary descendants of those successful immigrants themselves, a very different narrative seems to have taken hold.
At the level of culture, why do some narratives prevail and others fail? The answer may lie partly in the nature of the story itself. Certain master narratives may resonate well with the experiences of their adherents while promoting values that are intrinsically appealing. In that it affirms values of optimism and resilience and seems to promote the generative strivings of midlife American adults, the redemptive self may be seen as a good story, at least in certain ways. But the primacy of master narratives also stems from forces beyond the story itself (Gjerde, 2004). More often than not, master narratives themselves serve the interests of governments, militaries, religious authorities, oligarchs, industry, the wealthy classes, and other groups who wield considerable power (Foucault, 1982). What Hammack (2009) describes as the master narrative of Israel’s heritage motivates and justifies the subjugation of the Palestinian people. Variations on the redemptive self can be used to validate rampant consumerism in the search for upward social mobility or political complacency in the face of shameless income inequality (McAdams, 2006). Much like Freud’s (1900/1953) classic conception of dreams, master narratives are overdetermined—their origins and their staying power derive from many different sources, both in the minds of individuals and in the hegemonic forces that prevail in society and in culture.
Because they serve the interests of power, master narratives cannot help but function as subjugating discourses. Individual human beings, living as they do in culture, are subject to overarching cultural narratives that function to oppress them, to stifle their longings, and to keep them pacified when they might act, or agitated when they might instead sit back and enjoy life, even when they do not know it. And yet individual human beings push back, as often as not. Master narratives are not always so overmastering as to turn people into pawns. As would-be authors of their own lives, human beings sometimes appropriate master narratives, selectively choosing those features of the cultural script that work for them while rejecting other parts (McAdams, 2006). Moreover, some people simply say no. They know the cultural story, and they repudiate it. They opt out of the master narrative, or at least they think they do. They find a different story line that, as they see it, goes against the grain of convention. Rebellious storytellers do not have to act alone. Even while powerful forces of society promulgate the master narratives, other groups and institutions may stand in opposition. For example, an entire movement in American and European psychotherapy—called narrative therapy—has its origins in efforts to teach therapy clients how to generate new forms of life narrative designed to emancipate them from the subjugating (and pathologizing) discourses of mainstream society (White & Epston, 1990).
Narrative researchers have coined the term counter narratives to refer to the stories people tell and live, which offer resistance to dominant cultural narratives (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004). Counter narratives, then, run counter to master narratives. As such, counter narratives often champion values, aspirations, and movements that challenge mainstream conceptions of the good life. Narratives that run counter to the redemptive self, for example, might call into question American optimism regarding upward social mobility, or identify negative, even sinister, motives in stories about overcoming adversity and giving back to society. Counter narratives can be edgier still. They can promote alternative lifestyles and value systems that directly oppose the respectable mainstream; they can motivate political resistance and call for the replacement of the status quo; they can opt out completely and celebrate a life of hedonism, or anomie. They can be a call for rebellion, or a lone cry in the wilderness. They can give voice to stories that have never been heard before.
Counter narratives often arise from marginalized or stigmatized groups. Saguy and Ward (2011) examined stories that obese American women have begun to tell about their experiences with their bodies. The researchers identified a nascent social movement about “coming out as fat” (Saguy & Ward, 2011, p. 53). Borrowing tropes from the gay and lesbian culture, overweight women have begun to construct narratives that celebrate being overweight, describing their own personal journeys toward being fat or delineating a process of personal discovery whereby they came to understand and fully appreciate their status as a fat person. Their counter narratives aim to transform a stigma into a strength.
Andrews (2004) observed that European and American stories about mothers seem to converge on a broadly shared master narrative about human development: mothers are usually good, the story goes; they provide nourishment and nurturance; how a person turns out, in a psychological sense, is a function of his or her early experiences with mother. Andrews (2004), however, sought to reveal counter narratives that many adults have about their mothers, stories of maternal neglect or maternal irrelevance that are rarely told. In her intensive qualitative study, Andrews revealed stories of beating, neglect, and maternal depression. She also found that the adult narrators who recalled these negative events with their own mothers did not typically follow the expected interpretive path for such stories. Rather than blame their mothers for their own problems later in life, they typically forgave them while insisting that no long-term damage was done anyway. Andrews (2004) wrote, “Implicitly challenging the deterministic mother-blaming which lies at the heart of key cultural narratives, these men and women reveal a deep level of understanding – both personal and political – of the difficult circumstances which form the context of many people’s experiences of mothering and being mothered” (p. 7).
Master narratives about race, class, and gender in American society suggest that White men hold most of the power, women are generally weak and inferior, and poor Blacks typically live in dysfunctional families. In a study of daytime television talk shows, Squire (2004) revealed surprising counter narratives that run against these mainstream expectations. The first of these is what Squire (2004) labeled “white trash pride” (p. 221). Squire observed that certain episodes in these shows aimed to explore and ultimately critique social pathology in poor White households. The main characters in the counter narrative of White trash pride were drug-abusing mothers, typically sporting tattoos and bleached blond hair, and their derelict, unemployed men who drove rusted out trucks with shotguns in back.
Running parallel to these depictions was a counter narrative about “the exemplary Black citizen,” usually an African American female, who chastises dirt-poor White folk for their irresponsibility. In a recurrent juxtaposition of these two narratives, the TV host would bring the White protagonists on stage and encourage them to argue or fight. Perhaps the ex-husband had failed to pay child support, or the ex-wife had slept with the teenage boy living in the trailer next door. And then members of the studio audience would react. The scenario might culminate in an impassioned response of moral rectitude delivered by a Black woman in the audience. Her rhetorical power is enhanced by the fact that she is Black, reversing the overt expectations of the master narrative. Squire (2004) was quick to point out, however, that the reversal does not signal an end to American racism. The moral censure of the poor Whites is magnified by the idea, asserted in the cultural master narrative, that this kind of social pathology is typically what Blacks do. The studio audience and the viewers at home know this, even if they might not consciously acknowledge it. The fact, then, that the censure comes from a Black woman unconsciously reinforces the master narrative, even as it brings a counter narrative to the fore.
In many ways, the world is smaller today than it has ever been. Global communications, increased trade and immigration, and the ubiquity of the Internet have managed to shrink the geographical and cultural spaces that have traditionally kept different human groups apart and kept them different. For better and for worse, cultural narratives compete more directly with each other than they have ever competed before, and they mix and blend into unpredictable patterns. The narrative mash-up plays out in the minds of individual human beings, as they struggle to make sense of their lives as cultural animals. For many of the world’s human inhabitants, therefore, the influence of culture on personality is more complicated and contested today than it may have been even half a century ago. And the domain within personality wherein the cultural shaping is probably most pronounced is the domain of narrative identity.
The life narrative challenge is often revealed in stark relief under conditions of cultural conflict. For example, Gregg (2005) has examined how contemporary young men and women living in the Middle East and North Africa try to construct hybrid identities that draw creatively from traditional cultural codes of modesty and honor, Islamic beliefs and practices (which do not always comport with the traditional codes), and the modern West (which is like neither of the above). This is not an easy thing to do, Gregg points out, especially under conditions of economic underdevelopment. Against very difficult odds, Middle Easterners are seeking to adopt modern ideas, technologies, and styles of life and to preserve their cultural heritages, in mainly impoverished (and sometimes war-torn) societies wherein the prospects of economic advancement are poor.
Immigration—legal and otherwise, voluntary and coerced—has in recent years become an extraordinarily contentious issue in the United States and in Europe. Many U.S. citizens, whose ancestry is nearly always traceable to immigration, express resentment of undocumented Latin American immigrants who have crossed the border to find a better life in the north. European citizens feel threatened by waves of immigration from Syria and other war-torn countries. In both examples, moreover, the migrants feel threatened, too—not only by the often horrific conditions back in their respective homelands but also by the foreign cultures that they now must directly confront. The fear and the mistrust go to issues of politics, economics, and people’s very survival, for sure. But they also summon up conflicts in cultural narratives and the clash of identities. Who are these new people? Their lives, and their stories, are very different from our own. Can I ever be like one of them, while still being myself?
In an environment degrees of magnitude less threatening but perhaps no less complicated, bicultural people living in relatively peaceful societies face daunting identity challenges as well. Syed and Azmitia (2008) examined the stories written by young Asian American and Latino/Latina adults about events in their lives wherein they became aware of their ethnicity. They found that bicultural students whose stories highlighted experiences of prejudice and of close connection to their culture of origin showed relatively high levels of identity achievement. In this instance, the clash of cultures helped to jumpstart identity development. Other studies have examined bicultural identity integration (BII: Huynh, Nguyen, & Benet-Martínez, 2011). Higher levels of BII are indexed by an ability to blend opposing cultures (rather than keeping them separate in mind and behavior) and to experience a sense of harmony between them (rather than expecting conflict). Although research has not directly investigated the claim, it would be expected that biculturals who enjoy higher levels of BII should construct life stories that draw creatively from two different sets of cultural master narratives.
As different cultures compete with each other and offer contrasting master narratives for the construction of identity, some have asked if it might not be possible to formulate a meta-narrative that goes beyond the more specific and ethnocentric stories with which human beings are most familiar. For example, some have argued that becoming a global citizen represents a noteworthy psychological and narrative challenge for the current times (Jensen, Arnett, & McKenzie, 2011). The construction of global citizenship suggests that people may transcend the master narratives of ethnicity, religion, and nation-states to embrace stories about being part of the human collective writ large. What kind of a life story does a good global citizen construct? How might people create stories that balance their family, ethnic, and religious affiliations with their desires to be part of a broader world community? These are relatively new questions for the human species. It would seem to be the case that humans did not evolve to develop strong allegiances to out-groups. Yet questions like these may become increasingly salient over the course of the 21st century as people the world over begin to consider the possibility that addressing more successfully the world’s biggest problems may require the assistance of evermore inclusive master narratives, perhaps even something approaching a pan-cultural human story.
Internalized and evolving stories of the self comprise an important feature of human personality. Along with individual differences in traits, goals, and motives, variations in narrative identity describe how one person is psychologically different from another. It is at the level of narrative identity, moreover, that culture and personality come to rather dramatic terms with one another. Culture shapes the story in determinative ways. In a deep sense, then, persons and their respective cultures share authorship of life stories.
The ontogeny of narrative identity begins with the emergence of autobiographical memory in early childhood and runs through the consolidation of autobiographical reasoning in the adolescent and emerging-adulthood years. Cultural shaping shows up at the very beginning. Culturally contoured patterns of parent-child conversations establish templates for the development of an autobiographical self, and thereby the formation of narrative identity. Different groups are endowed with different narrative resources, as a function of factors like gender, race, class, religion, and the historical moment wherein the narrator lives. Narrators push back against the constraints they face. But at the end of the day, they cannot transcend their resources.
Master narratives of culture spell out consensually recognized scripts about group identity and how a member of a given group should live. Master narratives may motivate and inspire, but they can also oppress, marginalize, and serve as an apologia for the powerful status quo. Counter narratives arise to affirm values and ways of living that are absent in, or run in opposition to, the master narratives. Amidst the swirl of competing narratives, individual human beings struggle to make meaning of their own lives, borrowing and appropriating from the stories they know or imagine. In the modern world, narrative identities increasingly resemble hybrid texts, dynamic mash-ups of personal experience, and diverse cultural offerings. Personality and culture make each other up through life narrative. The stories we live by are not completely our own. But they are enough our own as to call upon all of our authorial powers and to draw upon all of our cultural resources in order to create something worth living, and worth telling as we live it.
The preparation of this manuscript was supported by a grant to the first author to establish the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. Address correspondence to Dan P. McAdams, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2120 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL. 60208. Internet: dmca@northwestern.edu
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