McAdams

Dan McAdams and Jennifer Pals stated that it is crucial that personality researchers move beyond the success of the “Big Five” trait theory and develop an integrative vision for understanding the whole person. Toward that end, they proposed a new big five for conceptualizing personality as…

1.     an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of

2.      dispositional traits

3.     characteristic adaptation

4.     self-defining life narratives, complexly and differentially situated

5.     In culture and social context."

In regard to the first domain, they describe the importance of human evolutionary history and the insights from evolutionary psychology in delineating the general architecture of the human mind. For the second domain, they refer to the Big Five traits. Characteristic adaptations, the third domain and focus of this post, refers to the feelings, goals, strategies, values, tendencies and many other aspects of human individuality that reflect the general pattern of responding that individuals exhibit in response to certain situations. Importantly, McAdams and Pals note that “there exists no definitive, Big Five–like list of these kinds of constructs." It is this gap I am seeking to fill here. The fourth domain refers to a person’s self-conscious identity. People construe their lives as stories and these stories regulate behavior and help people connect with and navigate within the larger social and cultural context (e.g., connecting with a political or national identity). The fifth and final domain is the sociocultural context in which personality develops, which refers to the large scale systems of justifications and traditions in which people are immersed.