In their century-long hunt for the key to personality, researchers have never glimpsed the elusive object of their pursuit. “No one has ever seen personality,” as an early tester once stated the obvious.
But don’t tell that to Turhan Canli. Sitting in his office at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, Long Island, the neuroscientist clicks open a richly detailed image on his computer screen.
“Here, look,” he says.
The picture, captured with a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is of a brain: a ghostly apparition, its folds and furrows rendered in sepulchral shades of gray. “This is the brain of an introverted person,” Canli announces. He clicks again. “And this is the brain of an extroverted person.” Another picture appears, and this time the pallid form is dappled with red and yellow spots that look like a flock of butterflies. Here, in vivid color, is visual evidence of a difference about which human beings have speculated for more than two thousand years.
Canli, boyish and slight with curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses, performed this particular experiment in 1999 while a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Subjects were given an abbreviated version of the NEO PI-R to determine their relative levels of introversion and extroversion. Then their brains were scanned using an MRI machine, which exposes the brain’s tissues to a magnetic field. Molecules in the brain respond differently to the magnet depending on factors such as how much oxygen they’re carrying, and these differences are used to generate images like the ones on Canli’s screen. Cells that are full of oxygen (and are therefore not being used at the moment) show up as gray; cells that are depleted of oxygen (and are therefore being given a workout by some kind of brain activity) show up in color.
While their brains were being scanned, subjects were presented with positive and negative stimuli—that is, shown photographs of happy and unhappy things. Canli brings up these pictures with another click of his mouse: the cheerful photos depict babies, puppies, ice cream; the grim ones, snakes, spiders, and piles of human skulls. When Canli and his colleagues looked at the resulting brain scans, the effect was striking. When shown the sunny pictures, the brains of people who tested as introverts remained quiescent, while the brains of people who tested as extroverts fairly bloomed with activity.
Canli, now an assistant professor of psychology at SUNY Stony Brook, believes that discrepancies like this one reveal an intrinsic difference in the way people with varied personalities process information about the world. Extroverts, it seems, are wired to respond automatically and affirmatively to positive stimuli, while introverts are not. Such individual differences in brain reactivity, he says, amount to a person’s “neural signature.” Though Canli warns, “I’m cautious about the overinterpretation of this data,” he confesses that he and his lab assistant at Stanford used to play a game: the assistant would show him a brain scan, and Canli would guess whether the person to whom it belonged was an introvert or an extrovert.
“If a life-or-death decision was based on that kind of assessment, I wouldn’t be comfortable making it,” he says firmly. Then he relents. “But just for fun? Yeah, I can make that distinction, and I’m usually right.”
Turhan Canli is only one of many scientists now exploring the biological underpinnings of personality. “Personality research in general is moving away from woolly psychology into real biology,” says Sam Gosling, a personality psychologist at the University of Texas. Since fMRI and other advanced brain-scanning technologies became widely available in the mid-1990s, investigators have used them to make intriguing connections between the way people behave and the way their brains operate. High levels of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, for example, have been linked to optimism and extroversion, while greater activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain a few inches behind the bridge of the nose) has been associated with negativity and neuroticism.
While no one has used brain scans as the basis for a personality test—yet—researchers are already pointing to their potential value in spotting mental illness. Carl Schwartz, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, has found increased activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala in introverted adults, and suggests that MRI scans of children might identify those at risk of anxiety disorders later in life. Joseph Matarazzo, a leading behavioral neuroscientist, predicts that people suffering from panic attacks and other psychological conditions will one day be diagnosed by their brain scans.
In the meantime, other biological approaches are yielding additional insights into personality. For example, research indicates that the nervous systems of introverts are more sensitive than those of extroverts, making them more likely to startle at a loud sound, jitter after a cup of coffee, or pucker at a drop of lemon juice. Measures of heart rate show that depressed people have a relatively slower heartbeat, while fearful people have a faster one. Analyses of the electroconductivity of the skin demonstrate that anxious and neurotic individuals settle down less quickly after they’ve been stressed. Even eye movements can provide clues to personality. Scientists have found that when we pause to think something over, our eyes habitually glance to one side or the other. People who look to the left tend to be affected more deeply by negative stimuli, while people who look to the right tend to respond more intensely to the positive.
Assays of the various chemicals swimming in our bloodstreams offer another source of information about personality. Studies of immune-system reactions, for example, reveal that in response to hepatitis B vaccinations, neurotics produce fewer antibodies than well-adjusted people. High levels of the hormone testosterone have been tied to aggressiveness, sensation seeking, social dominance, and sexual activity. (In one recent study, members of college fraternities with elevated average testosterone were more “rambunctious,” more “wild and unruly,” and “outstanding in the crudeness of their behavior,” while brothers in low-testosterone frats were more academically successful, more socially responsible, and came across as “friendly and pleasant.”) Measures of cortisol, another hormone, show that high-cortisol individuals tend to be solitary, depressed, and “appreciative of fantasy, aesthetics, ideas, and values,” while low-cortisol people are usually brash, exuberant thrill seekers.
Chemicals at work in the brain seem to be especially closely associated with temperament and behavior. Scientists suspect that the neurotransmitter norepinephrine helps regulate the upbeat feelings we get in response to positive activities or achievements, leading those with lower levels to seek additional stimulation from the outside world. Monoamine oxidase (MAO), an enzyme that breaks down norepinephrine and other neurotransmitters, is another substance that has attracted the attention of researchers. Low levels of MAO (suggesting accelerated breakdown of feel-good chemicals like norepinephrine) have been correlated with criminality, drug use, sexual promiscuity, and other “norm-breaking behavior.”
In tandem with such findings have come striking discoveries in the genetics of personality. Studies of identical twins raised apart suggest that about 50 percent of individual differences in personality can be traced to our genetic inheritance. Now DNA analysis has begun to connect specific genes to particular personality traits. One of the strongest of these links concerns a gene that controls the development of sites in the brain known as dopamine receptors. Individuals who inherit one form of the gene tend to be excitable and impulsive; they may be diagnosed with higher rates of attention deficit disorder, and they may be more likely to abuse drugs. Scientists have also identified a gene that affects the way serotonin is transported in the brain (serotonin is the brain chemical influenced by the class of antidepressant drugs that includes Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft). Research indicates that people with a particular version of this gene are more anxious and neurotic, and more focused on avoiding potential harm.
Surveying such developments, scientists like Roger Brent of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, anticipate the day when it will be possible to “look at all the genes in an organism and predict its behavior”—to locate the key to personality in the body’s flesh and blood.
Even ordinary personality questionnaires are now primed for dramatic change, thanks in this case to advances in computing technology. The move from pencil and paper to keyboard and screen promises to change the very nature of the tests, from inert lists of items to dynamic programs that monitor and even interact with their subjects.
For example: psychologists have long suspected that the length of time a person takes to reply to a question—what they call “response latency”—is a revealing fact. (Carl Jung acted on this possibility when he timed his word-association test.) Now they are at work on software that will measure, to a fraction of a second, how quickly we punch in (A) or (B). Keyboards may also be equipped to gauge the degree of pressure applied (imagine a forceful “True!” or “False!” in response to the MMPI item “I loved my mother”). The flexibility of computerized administration could even allow the test to modify itself as a person takes it—exploring in more depth, for example, an area that appears from early answers to be problematic. More unsettlingly, a computer can be programmed to cut short a testing session when it becomes clear that the subject won’t meet a preset standard. Called the “countdown method,” this tactic is reminiscent of vaudeville’s hook: fail to perform, and you’re yanked off the stage.
Pushing the potential of technology even further, psychologists are beginning to use computers to test “automatic” or unconscious reactions—split-second responses that are beyond our control and so may be more revealing than our premeditated choices. Participants are asked to make judgments about a series of words or images: the stimulus flashes on the screen, and the test taker must immediately classify it as “good” or “bad,” “me” or “not me.” The speed with which a subject makes the selection—regardless of his ultimate answer—is thought to impart information about his unconscious beliefs.
This approach, known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), was early on used to investigate people’s underlying feelings about race. Results demonstrated that people who consider themselves to be unprejudiced—even, in fact, minority-group members themselves—actually show signs of unconscious bias. Though subjects may eventually enter “good” in response to a black face, for example, it often takes them longer to do so than to make the same judgment about a white face. Used this way, the IAT is like a high-tech version of Kenneth Clark’s doll studies.
The technique has also been employed to study personality-related characteristics like anxiety, shyness, self-esteem, depression, and phobia, to surprising effect. The test picks up tendencies toward shyness, for example, in people who do not register as shy on conventional personality questionnaires and who speak without shyness in observed interactions with others (both behaviors that are more or less under conscious control)—but who do betray shyness in their nonverbal behavior, gestures that remain outside control and even awareness.
Another innovative use of computers applies linguistic analysis to samples of speech. The way people talk reveals much about their personalities, says psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas. He and his colleagues have developed a program that calculates the frequency with which individuals use certain types of words: pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, auxiliary verbs. “People who talk in the present tense and use a lot of first-person pronouns are different from people who employ the past tense and who don’t often use pronouns,” reports Pennebaker. “The first group tends to be very direct and immediate, while the second is made up of more psychologically distanced people.”
If biological markers, genetic analysis, and computer technology continue their rapid development, the familiar pencil-and-paper personality test may soon be completely obsolete—supplanted by a syringe, a swab, or a click of the mouse.
Impressive as they may seem, however, none of these advances in assessment have yet approached a key to human nature. Many of them are notably inexact—James Pennebaker himself calls his word-counting program “shamelessly crude”—and many rely on approximate or indirect measures. Levels of neurotransmitters in living humans, for example, can only be estimated from the quantity of by-products (produced when they are broken down) found in blood, urine, or cerebrospinal fluid. The illuminated patterns produced by fMRI are not literal pictures of the brain at work, but visual models based on statistical analyses of quantitative data.
Even more precise measures can provide only a piece of the puzzle of why people are the way they are. Testosterone, for example, rises and falls in response to specific situations, and it works in concert with a host of other hormones. Likewise, the action of the dopamine receptor gene or the serotonin transporter gene can account for only a tiny part of an individual’s total personality. Hundreds of genes are involved in every complex human behavior, and a single gene may explain just 1 percent or 2 percent of the variance in the way people act. “The most replicated associations have been between the dopamine D4 receptor gene and ‘novelty seeking’ and between the serotonin reuptake transporter gene and anxiety,” notes researcher Jonathan Benjamin of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “But even these reports are controversial, and their effects are too small to add to existing scientific theories or allow for clinical use in psychological counseling.”
The tools of science are so elegant, its authority so unimpeachable, that we may be tempted to accept its pronouncements without question. As Turhan Canli says of his fMRI scans: “People see pictures of the brain and they get seduced into thinking that this is the absolute, unbiased truth.” Especially when the object of study is human nature itself, however, there’s less absolute truth than assumptions, guesses, and wishful thinking at work. Nikos Logothetis, a neurobiologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, has gone so far as to call much of the recent research using magnetic resonance imaging a “new phrenology.” MRI technology is less reliable than scientists have claimed, he says, and the interpretations scientists draw from its data are oversimplified. The technique may fail to pick up a significant amount of activity going on in the brain, and in any case, scientists aren’t even completely sure what it means when a region of the brain “lights up” on their screen.
The potential applications of personality genetics may likewise be oversold, says Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health who helped discover the serotonin transporter gene. He is asked if he can imagine a day when a personality test will be performed on a DNA sample. “I can imagine a day when people will be selling that, sure, in much the same way that people today sell personality profiles derived from paper-and-pencil questionnaires,” he replies. “The genetic personality tests will contain about just as much voodoo as the current ones do—a sort of semi-science.”
The next time we gape at the moony glow of an MRI scan or marvel at news of another genetic discovery, we may do well to remember the certain faith people once placed in bumps on the head.
A look back at the history of personality testing can feel like one long wave of déjà vu. The cycle, repeated endlessly, goes like this: psychologists devise a novel way of assessing personality and boldly declare it a key to human nature. The method is widely acclaimed; then, inevitably, it’s debunked; at last, it’s superseded by the next new thing. “We never seem to solve our problems or exhaust our concepts; we only grow tired of them,” observed Gordon Allport of his colleagues’ ever-changing “fashions.” But why? Why do psychologists participate in this perpetual merry-go-round, taking the rest of us along for the ride?
The answer can be found in the pivot on which the whole enterprise turns. This axis is not a genuine desire to understand the individual in all her depth and nuance; it is the imperative to meet the needs of powerful institutions, and it has had profound consequences for the way all of us understand ourselves. One of the earliest exigencies to spur the creation of personality tests was doctors’ need to diagnose the mentally ill. Hermann Rorschach and Starke Hathaway developed their assessments within the walls of mental hospitals, and though the tests have since been extended to the rest of us, they still bear the odor of disease and dysfunction. The Rorschach and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory imagine us as an assemblage of ailments, the sum of our sicknesses; they are like “mental thermometers,” in the words of one critic, equipped to detect illness but incapable of describing health.
Coming just after the doctors were corporate and government bureaucrats, with their need to sort and manage large groups of people. Isabel Myers and her many imitators obliged with tests that treated the individual like an interchangeable part, a cog that could be fit neatly into the general assembly. Though he had not intended it, Henry Murray, too, became a partner in the commodification of personality, his test turned into a marketing tool. As they’re used today, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Thematic Apperception Test imagine us as the useful minions of institutions, our activities limited to laboring and purchasing, getting and spending.
And all along there were psychologists themselves, driven by their own powerful need: to be regarded at last as real scientists. Raymond Cattell pursued this aim with passionate intensity, determined to distill human nature down to its purest essence. His successors in this quest, Robert McCrae and Paul Costa Jr., have reduced the complexity of human nature even further. The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire and the NEO Personality Inventory imagine us as inert objects of study, laboratory specimens with no more agency or individuality than a particle under a microscope.
The three strands of medicine, industry, and science wove themselves tightly together over the course of the last century, forming the web of ideas and assumptions that we know today as personality. These institutional interests made personality what they needed it to be—inborn, unchanging, easily quantified, precisely measurable—rather than what it actually was. Yet again and again, human nature proved itself too wily, too complex and changeable to be ensnared in their net. Hence the endless procession of new theories, new techniques, new tests, each as superficial and short-lived as the last. The inadequacy of these efforts becomes apparent when we consider that not one of the complicated, contradictory people whose stories are told in this book could be captured by their own test.
We might well give thanks that personality has proved so ingeniously elusive—except for two sobering facts. First, these tests have serious real-life consequences, in our classrooms, courtrooms, and workplaces. And second, the narrow, self-interested way we’ve been imagined by institutions has left us without a satisfying way to imagine ourselves. Personality tests provide a quick, simple take, stamped with the impressive imprimatur of science. Some possess a glib attractiveness, promising instant insight, illumination on the cheap. But they cannot offer a prospect from which to view ourselves whole. The vistas they afford are too restricted, obscured by the objectives and agendas of others. In this sense, all personality tests engage in “a psychology of the stranger.”
Is there another way? The answer begins to come clear when we consider how any one of us gets to know a stranger: he tells us his story.
Dodge Morgan was born in Maiden, Massachusetts, in 1932. His father died when he was a small child, and his widowed mother did whatever was necessary to support the family, including shoveling coal in a shipyard. Growing up fatherless during the Depression, Morgan faced daunting hardships, but he maintained a cheerful disposition. “He is such an optimist,” says his wife, Manny, “that he will honestly tell you that the fact that his father died when he was three years old was the best thing that ever happened to him. He is absolutely determined to make something good out of everything.”
As a young man, he worked at his uncle’s boatyard, a frustrating existence for someone who longed to set sail himself. “From an early age, I was surrounded by boats I could not use,” Morgan notes wryly, recalling “watching others sail off and wishing I could.” Whenever he got the chance, he took it: “What I loved most about sailing was to go alone beyond the tether.”
Morgan’s older brother, Russ, and his grandfather, “Cap,” were dominant figures. “Russ really filled the role of my father,” he reflects. “He and Cap were my male role models, and no one ever had anyone more male than they.” Russ was “handsome, strong, athletic, decisive, competent in so many ways,” while Cap “simply was hell-bent and eccentric. He drank hard, did all the male things hard.” His grandfather spoke in salty adages, among them: “The four most beautiful things in the world are a ship under sail, a full bottle of rum, a woman’s body, and a field of wheat.”
Following high school Morgan went on to the University of New Hampshire, where he was later expelled for a prank involving firing a cannon in the Dean of Women’s bedroom. Morgan joined the Air Force, graduating second in his cadet class and flying fighter planes for five years. Following his stint in the service he returned to college, graduating in 1959 with a degree in journalism. Morgan’s first job as a reporter was in Alaska, writing for the Anchorage Daily News. For three years he lived as frugally as possible, in a cabin without running water, and managed to save $23,000. The money went for a wooden schooner named Coaster, which Morgan proceeded to sail alone for two and a half years, from Maine to the Caribbean to Hawaii to Alaska.
By now, Morgan had married his first wife, but she left him during one of his maritime adventures. As would be the case throughout his life, he had a complicated relationship to intimacy and solitude. “I have a natural tendency to put the blinders on to the needs of other people,” he acknowledges, though he was also “afraid of ending up old and alone in some harbor.” Reluctantly, Morgan sold the boat and came ashore, but he promised himself then that he would one day return to the sea.
Morgan now got a job at a manufacturing firm in his home state. Three years later, when the company sold off its electronics division, Morgan bought it himself. He and three employees set up shop in a garage, assembling devices like police radar detectors. The company, Controlonics, grew prosperous, generating annual sales of more than $25 million a little over a decade after Morgan took it over. By now he was married again, to Manny, with whom he had a son, Hoyt, and a daughter, Kimberly.
Successful as he was, Morgan started to feel restless and began fantasizing about a return to the sea. He became so preoccupied that Manny worried about another woman. “When he finally told me he wanted to sail around the world, it was almost a relief,” she says. Morgan’s brother was less generous: “You’re out of your goddamn mind,” Russ told him.
Morgan—fifty-one years old, an accomplished businessman, the father of two small children—knew his plan seemed preposterous, but he felt compelled to follow it anyway. “My place in the customary order of things is secure,” he mused at the time. “But the customary order of things is not enough. How much more is there? It is time to try again to find out. There is so little time left.”
This need to see himself as an active and vigorous hero formed an important part of Morgan’s personality; his greatest fear was growing effete and coddled. “Sailing a boat alone is such an uncomplicated way to stay on the edge. I think it allows you to sort out what is important in life,” he explains. “I think there are a lot of overcivilized people out there drinking coffee out of a Wedgwood cup.” In 1983, he sold his business for $32 million. The next two years were a focused period of anticipation as he supervised the building of his boat and prepared himself physically and psychologically for the journey. At last, after a two-decade wait, he was ready to make good on his promise.
Morgan set off on his trip around the world on a clear, sunny morning in November 1985. His departure from St. George, Bermuda, was actually his second, after mechanical problems forced him to make a false start—but on this day the crisp sails of American Promise filled with wind and its sleek white hull sliced neatly through the water. As people and land and then even other boats disappeared into the horizon, Morgan contemplated the challenge he’d set for himself: to sail alone around the world without stopping, in 220 days or less. He had another goal, too: “I want to come back knowing myself in a deeper way than I do now,” he said, adding in his sober fashion, “I’m afraid of some of the things I’m going to learn.”
Morgan, a rugged man whose impassive countenance occasionally breaks into a boyish smile, had in mind the kind of self-reflection that only prolonged periods of solitude can induce. But he also had available a more conventional forum for introspection. On board his 60-foot sloop were 1,600 pounds of food and drink, 650 pounds of tools and spare parts, 300 pounds of clothing—and more than two hundred personality tests, sealed in waterproof packets.
The tests were Manny’s doing. Looking for a way to make her husband’s venture more than a vain self-indulgence, she had contacted two professors at Boston College to ask if they could use him as a case study. The psychologists, William Nasby and Randolph Easton, jumped at the chance. Morgan would become their captive subject, expected to take a personality test every day of his potentially life-changing journey.
By the time they were done, Dodge Morgan would have perhaps psychology’s most-studied personality, documented not only in hundreds of test results but in interviews and correspondence with the two investigators, a daily journal and ship’s log kept during the trip, and reels and reels of film taken by the six cameras mounted on Morgan’s boat. This one man would become the subject of two dissertations and half a dozen scholarly articles, including an entire issue of the Journal of Personality. Though Easton would eventually drop out of the project, it became a kind of obsession for Nasby, a puzzle that demanded to be solved. His approach to studying Morgan eventually shaped itself into a comparison. On one side were the insights into his subject Nasby gleaned from pencil-and-paper tests. On the other side was a very different technique, a “life story” approach that examined Morgan through the stories he told about himself and his life.
From the tests (which included the TAT, the 16PF, and a close cousin of the MMPI) Nasby learned some useful, though limited, information: Morgan scored high on Exhibition, Endurance, and Dominance, low on Affiliation, Play, and Harm Avoidance. “Morgan is understood to be a man of great emotional stability and high conscientiousness who is highly focused on autonomy, endurance, dominance, and achievement,” Nasby noted. “Morgan is not particularly extroverted; neither is he particularly agreeable. Although his score indicates a relatively high level of openness to experience, his openness is limited by his strong preference for consistency and certainty.” He added that Morgan’s behavior was occasionally antisocial and narcissistic.
When Nasby shared a preliminary sketch with Morgan, his subject was unimpressed: “I don’t think I want to spend much time with the guy you are describing, and I sure as hell don’t want him living with my family.” The nuances of Morgan’s personality would emerge only from his story.
Morgan made good time in his first few days: heading south across the Atlantic Ocean, pointed toward the tip of Africa, he averaged 175 nautical miles a day. His emotional state, however, was not nearly so buoyant. With nothing to see but water and sky, nothing to hear but the snap of sails and the growl of his autopilot, Morgan suffered the “painful postpartum of leaving.” He felt seasick, anxious, lonely. “The cold reality of six months alone at sea hits me again with puzzling suddenness,” he wrote in his journal. “I am amazed I can prepare so intensely and be so acutely aware of this challenge and then be so abruptly shocked when I actually get under way.”
Each day, his routine was the same: rise, inspect the boat, fix things that were broken, scan weather and instrument gauges, read a bit, eat some of the freeze-dried food prepared by Manny. Even at night he got up every two hours to check on the boat and its progress. It was during his downtime that his feelings got the best of him: he read a sentimental story and cried uncontrollably. He turned off his tape player because music reminded him of people he loved. He was able to call home occasionally, but only felt worse after talking to his family. “It seems I cope better with the loneliness when I do not remind myself of the delicious alternative,” he noted forlornly.
Morgan devised ways to break up the solitude. He sang show tunes; he made shadow animals by the light of the moon; he walked the deck, looking for shooting stars. He was thrilled by the sight of any living creature: porpoises, albatrosses, flying fish. When he spotted a family of dolphins, he whistled, yelled, jumped up and down. “They like it when I make a fool of myself,” he smiled. But even as he was adjusting to the unrelenting aloneness, another dilemma arrived when the wind died, the sails grew slack and the boat bobbed uselessly. This predicament brought out the flip side of Morgan’s need for action: his restlessness, his rage and despair when there was nothing to be done.
“A storm, frightening as it often is, can somehow be dealt with by actions. The calm sets my nerves right on the edge,” Morgan wrote. “When Promise wallows, I feel each violent jerk of the lines as if they are my own sinews. I am under high tension. I hunt for any whiff of breeze, not only with my eyes but with my very soul … At least once per hour I let go, vent the pressure to scream curses into the west. And then I tense up again and plead, plaintively beg, for some wind … At midnight I give up the struggle to brood. Alone we sit in the middle of the ocean, eleven thousand miles from our destination, powerless.” Morgan was led to a deeper realization: “I need a sense of progress. It is the only dimension I have for life.”
In the midst of this emotional turmoil, he took his daily personality test, usually when his chores were done and the sun was setting. His account of a typical evening: “2030: Eat dinner straight from cooking pot. Sit on deck if good weather, in pilothouse if not. Contemplate state of world. Maybe more reading or writing. 2345: Time for science and a few laughs; take psychological tests.” He found the tests amusing in their total disconnection from the life he was leading. “They are so irrelevant to my world now,” he observed. “ ‘Do I like my parents? Would I rather be an engineer or an actor? Do I enjoy playing practical jokes? Am I the life of the party?’ Who really gives a shit? I am the only party here.”
But “surely the psychological pros will be able to learn something useful from these hundreds of strange and irrelevant pieces of paper I scribble out for them,” he added slyly. “Oh yes, surely they will.”
The life story approach has been around as long as any personality test, but it has never quite managed to join the mainstream. It shows up on no surveys of test use. No company owns the right to distribute it. There are no workshops, textbooks, or videos to teach its interpretation. And its most prominent practitioner did his important work in the area almost six decades ago.
But then, Gordon Allport was never quite mainstream, either. Born in Indiana in 1897, he grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, as the youngest of four sons. From the beginning he was a bit different, not like his rowdy, boisterous older brothers. “I never fitted the general boy assembly,” he reflected. “I was quick with words, poor at games. When I was ten a schoolmate said of me, ‘Aw, that guy swallowed a dictionary.’” (It was a fitting gibe at someone who would later go on to comb the dictionary in the service of the lexical hypothesis.)
Allport went to Harvard and studied psychology, mostly because his brother Floyd had done so first. As Floyd became an enormously successful scholar—he founded the discipline of experimental social psychology—Gordon continued to play the role of dutiful understudy. Even as he himself enrolled in graduate school, Gordon was typing Floyd’s papers and assisting him in his research. Together the two brothers devised an early personality test measuring social dominance and submission—a ticklish subject for siblings engaged in intense, though submerged, competition.
After obtaining his PhD in 1922, Gordon broke away from Floyd’s powerful influence to study on his own in Germany. Gradually he became disenchanted with his brother’s highly quantified and mechanized conception of human nature, and enamored of European psychologists’ more flexible and holistic approach. “Floyd’s astoundingly neat system will not suffice,” Gordon decided, and set about writing what he candidly conceded was an “attack” on his brother’s theories. In an even bolder act of intellectual aggression, he submitted the finished article to the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology—edited by Floyd Allport.
His brother got the message. “You seem to be developing a type of Psychology somewhat different from mine,” Floyd observed, adding with malice disguised as magnanimity: “It is the next best thing to mine.” Gordon was enraged by his condescension—“He writes to me as he would to an unknown prof, in some distant dinky college,” he fumed—and resolved to cut his ties with Floyd and with conventional psychology. “I truly do not care if I never see my brothers and sisters-in-law again,” he declared, as he embarked on a career he would proudly describe as “maverick.”
Though Gordon Allport helped establish personality psychology as an academic discipline, teaching the first course and authoring the first textbook devoted to the subject, he always retained the role of bumptious younger brother, pointing out its flaws and pressing his own case. He believed that the field focused too much on dysfunction and disease, and not enough on the normal, healthy human. He was after something quite different: “I wanted an ‘image of man’ that would allow us to test in full whatever democratic and humane potentialities that he might possess. I did not think of man as innately ‘good,’ but I was convinced that by and large American psychology gave man less than his due.”
He thought, too, that personality psychology was excessively concerned with measurement and with the search for universal laws. Measurement is a useful tool, he noted, “but if it makes one think that one has embraced the totality of a personality by having a series of scores, then it has gone too far.” Allport deplored psychologists’ slavish imitation of biology, chemistry, and physics. “Following the lead of the older sciences they assume that the individual must be brushed aside,” he lamented. “Science, they insist, deals only with general laws. The individual is a nuisance. What is wanted are uniformities. This tradition has resulted in the creation of a vast, shadowy abstraction in psychology called the generalized-adult-human-mind. The human mind, of course, exists in no such form; it exists only in concrete, intensely personal forms.” He added, in what might have been his professional motto: “Personality is never general; it is always particular.”
But Allport rejected, as well, the byzantine complexity of Freudian psychoanalysis and its insistence on finding hidden motives behind ordinary actions. He chided the analysts’ determination to take “the long way around,” asking, “Has the subject no right to be believed?” In fact, Allport found little in American personality psychology that met his approval, becoming a critic of Starke Hathaway’s empirical test construction and Henry Murray’s theories of projection and Raymond Cattell’s methods of factor analysis. As one reviewer of an Allport book noted, “There is something in it to irritate almost everyone.”
What Allport did endorse was an approach to personality assessment that paid close and respectful attention to the individual. The best vehicle for such attention, he believed, was the story, and he demonstrated how it might be used with a long, intense investigation of a woman named Jenny. Allport had in his possession (he declined to say just how) more than three hundred letters from a middle-aged woman, written to a friend of her son’s. These documents formed the basis of Allport’s exploration of her personality. “The letters deal with a mother-son tangle and are written in a fiercely dramatic, personal style,” he noted. “Here surely is a unique life, calling for psychological analysis and interpretation.” Whenever Allport found himself “wishing that I could take refuge in vague generalizations,” his memory of Jenny’s complicated character “pins me down with the unspoken challenge, ‘And what do you make of me?’”
In the correspondence, which he used to teach generations of Harvard psychology students and which he published in 1965 as a book, Letters From Jenny, Allport employed pseudonyms: “Jenny” was not the woman’s real name, he acknowledged, and neither was “Glenn” the true identity of her younger confidant. Allport claimed that he made the changes to protect the correspondents’ privacy, but recent scholarship hints at another motivation: evidence dug up by psychologist David Winter strongly suggests that “Glenn” was Allport himself, and “Jenny” the mother of his own college roommate. Perhaps one reason Allport’s analysis of the letters is so compelling, writes Winters, is that they bear “the imprimatur of his own personal experience.”
Compelling or not, few psychologists were persuaded to go in the direction urged by Allport. Compiling life stories took a long time and didn’t yield the kind of neat categories and confident predictions preferred by science (and by industry). While an array of other assessments—self-report inventories, projective tests, factor-analyzed questionnaires—went on to join psychology’s mainstream, the life story approach still had a long way to go.
Now Dodge Morgan was sailing east around the bottom of the world, heading into the feared Southern Ocean. The “roaring forties,” as these latitudes are known, are difficult and dangerous ones for even the most experienced sailor. Storm after storm beat down on American Promise. Enormous waves rocked the boat more than forty-five degrees to each side, so that “the gray-green water rolls by the pilothouse windows as if we were a submarine,” Morgan observed. Cyclones whipped up the wind; icebergs loomed in the distance.
“Breaking waves are washing over the deck and often I stand in solid water to midcalf,” Morgan reported in his journal. “The day wears on painfully. The seas are up and very steep again and Promise slams into them like a tank into a trench.” He was tired, cold, and seasick. “I can’t help but think that anyone who willingly submits to this kind of awful punishment is either crazy or masochistic,” he added. “Which, I wonder, am I?”
Christmas Day arrived. Morgan sat on his bunk, humming Christmas carols to himself and opening the gifts his family placed on board months ago. He received a rum cake, a toaster, and some Super Glue, but “I do not have any Christmas spirit,” he noted glumly. Six days later, it was a party of one on New Year’s Eve. Looking into the camera in his pilothouse, he made some resolutions: not to covet his neighbor’s wife, not to argue with his boss, not to stray too far from home—and joked that they wouldn’t be hard to keep, at least for the next three months. “Happy New Year,” he said, waving wanly at the camera. “Sorry I don’t have a funny hat.”
On February 22, Day 103 of the trip, the cameras recorded Morgan again as he opened one of the psychologists’ waterproof packets. “Let’s see what they have for us, the world of science,” he muttered. The miserable weather had kept him inside for days, and he was plainly going a little stir-crazy. “It looks like … ho-ho! A personality profile.” He considered its first question—“How have you been feeling the past week, including today?”—and belligerently retorted, “Cold as the southern end of a well digger!”
Next he mock-helpfully explained the test to the whirring camera. “I have to say ‘not at all’ up to ‘extremely,’ and grade these things: ‘friendly, tense, angry, worn out, clearheaded, lively, sorry for things done, on edge, uncertain, full of pep.’” He paused and gave a slightly deranged grin. “Well, I could figure these out easy I Am I ‘light-hearted, unsure, jittery, bewildered, horny …’” He stopped again and looked impishly toward his imagined audience. “No, it doesn’t say ‘horny’ here,” he admitted. “I wish it did, because I would be able to answer that one.”
More fruitful was Morgan’s informal self-examination, periods of reflection that led him to a rewarding realization: for all its hardships, there was something solid and true about the strange life he was leading. “My world is naturally obvious and simple and direct, lived as it should be lived,” he asserted in his journal. “Existence belongs to creatures and elements with quick honesty, snap action, and interminable patience. Nothing else counts in this realm. Not intrigue or duplicity, rationalizations or negative wisdom, or life that needs change or senses that need constant stimulation. An individual human being belongs in this world. Humans’ institutions do not. Institutions have lives of their own, burdened by symbols and rites and castes that obscure any view of the truth.” He worked himself into a fevered denunciation: “Fuck them all, these institutions, from religions to college fraternities, organizations dedicated to dividing people and blurring the image of truth. We all must stand in our own space and see with our own mind the farthest horizon, and perhaps there we will see the source of our nature.”
Morgan’s spirits rose further as the weather cleared and he approached Cape Horn, the last great milestone on his long journey. As American Promise drew closer, he confessed, “I’m like water drops skittering on a hot skillet.” At last the imposing land mass heaved into view, and Morgan seemed stunned, his customary detachment dropping away. “What a sight, what a sight,” he whispered. Shaking off his awe, he pulled out a tuxedo jacket and three splits of champagne. He popped a cork, took a swig. “That one’s for me, but there’s three of us here.” He opened another bottle and poured it on the deck: “This one’s for Promise, a truly great boat.” One more pop. “This one’s for you, Cape,” he said, and he hurled the bottle toward the far-off bluffs.
“Now we are going home!”
When Gordon Allport died in 1967, the life story approach lost its most vigorous champion, and personality psychology—which would be thrown into crisis by Walter Mischel’s astute critique a year later—showed little interest in reviving it. Then a surprising thing happened: just around the time that the Big Five began its spectacular ascent, the life story approach, too, showed signs of life.
This resurgence is due in large part to one man: Dan McAdams, the same psychologist who has warned of the limits of the Big Five. McAdams, now fifty years old, began his research career using cards from the Thematic Apperception Test to study subjects’ “intimacy motivations.” Starting in the mid-1980s, however, he realized that what he really wanted to hear were stories from people’s actual lives. And so just as many of his fellow psychologists were turning to the Big Five—or even to brain scans and gene assays—as the newest way to understand personality, McAdams was returning to the oldest: telling stories.
From the outset, he was concerned with applying rigorous scientific standards to the often-fuzzy life story approach. He and his Northwestern colleagues developed a structured protocol for documenting life stories, a guided interview process that lasts about two hours. Interviewees are asked to divide their lives into “chapters”: childhood, adolescence, starting a family, building a career. They recount the leading events of each chapter, identifying main characters and describing specific scenes; they pick out turning points, high and low moments, most significant memories. They talk about recurrent struggles and conflicts, about their politics, values, and religious beliefs. Finally, they are asked to discern a dominant theme or message in their story, and to predict what future chapters might bring.
What matters in these investigations, McAdams stresses, is not the absolute veracity of the accounts, but the way they are presented. “Although these stories are grounded in reality, they are really fictions that we make up,” he explains. “What I want to know is not exactly what happened in your childhood, but what you think happened.” A fact such as “I was born prematurely on February 7, 1954,” says McAdams, is not as significant as its accompanying lesson: “My father always said I was lucky to survive that premature birth; I beat the odds once, and now I am going to make my life count in a big way.”
McAdams has worked out an objective system for coding these narratives, employing criteria such as complexity and coherence. Since 1997, he and his collaborators have used the system to evaluate hundreds of stories under the auspices of Northwestern’s Foley Center for the Study of Lives. Some intriguing findings have begun to emerge from their work: for example, a positive relationship between the coherence of individuals’ stories and their psychological well-being. This is a remarkable standard by which to gauge a person’s mental health: not according to an expert’s opinion or a norm group’s average, but according to that person’s degree of internal consistency. (It’s not an entirely novel standard, however: as McAdams himself points out, Sigmund Freud and other pioneers of talk therapy had as a conscious goal making their patients’ life stories at once more coherent and more complex.)
Even more telling than the stories’ unity, says McAdams, are the basic themes at their core. His research has focused especially on two divergent motifs: “redemption” stories and “contamination” stories. In a redemptive story, negative life events—even awful tragedies—are perceived as sowing the seeds of positive developments to come. By contrast, contamination stories describe good times that are subsequently spoiled, euphoria followed by a crash. McAdams has found that people who tell redemptive stories tend to be happier and more “generative”—more likely to contribute to their communities and to succeeding generations. It’s important to note, he says, that either of these templates can be applied to the very same series of events. He is interested not in actual incidents but in how they are interpreted; not in fixed states but in movement and its direction.
McAdams’s life story approach is, in many ways, the un-test. It has no norms; subjects are not assigned numbers or types. The model explicitly acknowledges that people change and that their stories develop along with them. It views individuals as active shapers of their own personalities, “coauthors” of their life story along with the time and place in which they live. Culture, along with factors such as race, class, and gender, are seen as integral elements of life stories. For this reason, there can be no universal key to personality, only unique, particular personalities, and shifting, evolving ones at that. McAdams relinquishes the grand goal that has propelled personality psychologists for almost a century: “There is no simple, single key to understanding the individual person,” he states bluntly, “no fundamental level of rock-bottom truth.”
For all these reasons, the life story approach is almost defiantly resistant to the requirements of institutions, just about useless for the purposes of sorting and screening and labeling. McAdams allows as much: “Life narratives are about knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” he says. “They don’t fit the agendas of industry or government.” Even within psychology, the approach is often viewed as hopelessly impractical. Vociferous champion of the Big Five Robert McCrae seems uncharacteristically confounded by life stories: “I do not yet know quite what to make of them,” he admits.
And yet they may be the only way to adequately describe or understand human beings as they genuinely are. Traditional personality tests present us with the world in microcosm, life with all its ambiguous stimuli, forced choices, and leaderless groups. But just as these tests’ questions and simulations cannot begin to capture the real world’s complexity, neither do the personalities they hand back to us begin to resemble the richness of our actual selves. The danger is that we may mistake their wan, washed-out copies for the lush, tangled beauty of the real thing. In contemplating an entity as intricate and enigmatic as personality, it seems wise to follow Gordon Allport’s counsel to be “tentative, eclectic, and humble.” On the subject of human nature, he liked to quote William James: “Our knowledge is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
Dodge Morgan sailed into the blue waters of Bermuda on April 11, 1986. By now his skin was deeply tanned, his hair shaggy and bleached by the sun. A brisk fifteen-knot wind blew, whipping the waves into six-foot swells and puffing Promise’s sails as it coursed its last few miles. Closer to shore, a chase boat scanned the horizon for the first sight of Morgan’s vessel; at last it appeared, a tiny white dot. Grant Robinson, a shipbuilder who supervised the construction of Morgan’s boat, was sitting at the controls. “American Promise, American Promise,” he radioed, his voice trembling just a little. “We have a visual.”
A brief silence, then a crackle. “Well, at least I haven’t become invisible,” Morgan radioed back, his laconic voice unmistakable.
He crossed the official finish line, about three miles from shore, at 12:17 p.m. He had sailed around the world, alone, in 150 days, one hour, and six minutes—cutting the previous record nearly in half. Proud as he was of his achievement, Morgan mostly wanted to see his family and friends. Once on shore, he will announce to the cheering crowd, “I have made up my mind that the race I really want to belong to is the human race.”
Now, as American Promise glided fully into view, the chase boat pulled up alongside. On board were Manny and Hoyt and Kimberly, waving furiously. Morgan leaned over the side as they drew near.
“You’re the first human beings I’ve seen in a hundred and fifty days!” he shouted. “You can’t believe how beautiful you look.”