5
Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality Author(s): Paul T. Costa, Jr. and Robert R. McCrae Source: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1993), pp. 20-23 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449588 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 11:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Psychological Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

Ego Development and Trait Models of PersonalityAuthor(s): Paul T. Costa, Jr. and Robert R. McCraeSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1993), pp. 20-23Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449588 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 11:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PsychologicalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

COMMENTARIES

Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

Paul T. Costa, Jr. and Robert R. McCrae Gerontology Research Center National Institute onAging National Institutes of Health

For the past 30 years, one of psychology's most distinguished theorists and methodologists has devoted herself to the study of a single construct and a single method for its measurement, and we are now asked to stand in judgment on the result. Was this approach fruitful? Is ego development an important aspect of personality, the "master trait" (Loevinger, 1966, p.205) that should be central to our understanding of the per- son? Do sentence completions scored by ogive rules capture a particular progression of characteristics that would inevitably be missed by self-report inventories and factor analysis?

Yes and no. We regard ego development as an illuminating construct and sentence completions as a valuable alternative to questionnaire methods, but we are not persuaded that they offer anything, either in substance or method, that could not in principle be obtained from more traditional measures of traits and abilities. Loevinger's implicit (and sometimes explicit) criticisms of trait and factor models are, we believe, misguided. Dispositional and developmental ap- proaches should be complementary, not mutually ex- clusive (McCrae & Costa, 1980).

It is worthwhile to put the issue in historical perspec- tive. As Loevinger recounts, her approach to ego devel- opment began around 1960, a difficult period in personality assessment. On the one hand, concern about social desirability (Edwards, 1957) and other response sets (Jackson & Messick, 1961) led to widespread questioning of the validity of self-report measures. On the other hand, factor analysis was in its heyday-Cat- tell (1957) had just proclaimed his system of Universal Index numbers for personality factors-but the exag- gerated claims for its objectivity and precision did not square well with the conflicting systems that different factor analysts advocated. It is easy to see why a re- searcher would look for alternative approaches to per- sonality structure and assessment.

But that was 30 years ago. We now know that the dangers of socially desirable responding were exagger- ated (McCrae & Costa, 1983; Nicholson & Hogan, 1990) and that self-reports can be validated against peer ratings (Funder & Colvin, 1988), behavioral observa- tions (Small, Zeldin, & Savin-Williams, 1983), and even sentence completions (McCrae & Costa, 1980, 1988). Most contemporary personality researchers re- gard factor analysis not as a mysterious and assump- tion-laden technique for uncovering the deep structure

of personality, but as a convenient way of identifying dimensions along which variables covary. And there is now considerable consensus among trait psychologists on what the major personality factors are: Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Openness to Experience (0), Agreeableness (A), and Conscientiousness (C)-the dimensions of the five-factor model (Digman, 1990; Wiggins & Pincus, 1992). We comment on Loevinger's work from this perspective.

Personality Assessment

Sentence completions are projective tests in the sense that they elicit spontaneous expressions from the subject and require that the researcher interpret the responses. Most of the research described by Loevinger in her target article concerns the interpretation of re- sponses and the development of manuals for reliable scoring. As a result of this extensive empirical work, we can be fairly sure that her instrument measures something. The external validity studies, which she describes less fully and which apparently played a much smaller role in the development of the theory and instrument, provide some support for its validity. Thus, this program of research can be seen as testimony to the possibility of developing reliable and valid projective tests.

Is there any advantage to the use of such tests? Loevinger writes that her Sentence Completion Test (SCT) "requires the respondent to display his or her own frame of reference. That gives a glimpse of per- sonality structure that objective tests cannot match." If by this she means that her tests provide different infor- mation, or more valid information, than objective scores can, we are skeptical. Rest's (1979) measure of moral development is objective, but it seems to have at least as much construct validity as does Loevinger's SCT. We found that judges could rate each of the five factors from free responses to the Twenty Statements Test (TST; McCrae & Costa, 1988), but these judg- ments were less powerful than objective self-reports in predicting the external criterion of peer ratings on the five factors (McCrae & Costa, 1989). A manual for scoring the TST as highly developed as that for scoring the SCT might have changed this result, but to date the alleged superiority of projective methods remains to be demonstrated.

20

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

COMMENTARIES

If, however, Loevinger means only that sentence completions illustrate features of personality as they are manifested in specific individuals, we cannot dis- agree. Indeed, as part of the Manual for the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985) we reported SCT responses because they so nicely communicated the nature of Openness. For ex- ample, a closed man responded to the stem, "Rules are ..." with "there to obey"; one open man responded with "necessary, but civil disobedience is one way to change them for 'progress."' The open response illustrates not only a liberal value system, but also (in the hedging use of quotations marks around the term progress) a sophis- ticated recognition that this approach to social prob- lems may not always be beneficial.

Personality Development

Our research has focused on the measurement of personality in adults over time. Our longitudinal find- ings, and those of most other researchers who have studied adults, are easily summarized: After age 30, most traits show little or no change in mean level, and individual differences are extremely stable (McCrae & Costa, 1990). The young introvert is likely to become an old introvert; barring catastrophic accidents or illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, the individual who is well-adjusted and cheerful at age 40 is likely to be equally well-adjusted and cheerful at age 90. Stabil- ity as a model of adult development may not be very interesting, but it seems to fit the facts better than any alternative.

By contrast, Loevinger's is an explicitly develop- mental model of personality that traces qualitative changes through a series of stages, and there is both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence for the the- ory. Are the two systems in conflict? Not at all. The development Loevinger postulates occurs chiefly in childhood and adolescence. By college age-certainly by age 30-ego development appears to be finished. In a sample of 240 men ranging in age from 35 to 80 years, the correlation of age with ego level was .01 (McCrae & Costa, 1980); Vaillant and McCullough (1987) re- ported that their 55-year-old sample had a distribution of ego levels similar to that found in college freshmen with similar backgrounds. Far from contradicting our finding of stability in personality, studies of ego devel- opment provide strong evidence of it: A variable that has demonstrated sensitivity to change in adolescence remains constant in adulthood.

Loevinger claims that factor-analytic approaches would never uncover developmental sequences such as the one she proposes. With a few exceptions (Harshman & Berenbaum, 1981), factor analysis has not been used to examine developmental data, but the discrete traits

identified by factor analysis could certainly be exam- ined in developmental designs. We might find, for example, that cognitive complexity increased linearly with age in the range from 10 to 20 years, whereas conformity to social rules first declined and then increased. A recent conference introduced the five- factor model to developmental psychologists (Halverson, Kohnstamm, & Martin, in press); this promises an exciting integration of trait and develop- mental psychologies.

The Place of Ego Level in the Five-Factor Model

The five-factor model has been enormously success- ful in accommodating personality variables proposed by different theorists. Most of the scales found in a large variety of personality questionnaires can be interpreted as variants or combinations of the standard five factors (McCrae, 1989). Could ego level be assimilated to one of the five factors?

To our knowledge there has been no study of ego development in relation to all five factors, but we did examine correlations between ego level and measures of N, E, and 0 (McCrae & Costa, 1980). Loevinger points out in her article that ego level is unrelated to psychological adjustment, and we found no relation to Neuroticism as measured by the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964) N scale. Similarly, we found no relation to the EPI E scale, suggesting that high-ego-level respondents are no more likely to be introverted than to be extraverted.

We did, however, find small but significant correla- tions between ego level and measures of Openness (rs = .13 to .27). This finding is perfectly reasonable. Both ego level and Openness concern styles of construing experience; both have conceptual roots in authoritari- anism (McCrae & Costa, in press); both show some relation to creativity (McCrae, 1987; Vaillant & McCullough, 1987) and to moral development (Lonky, Kaus, & Roodin, 1984). At least part of what Loevinger means by ego development is what we call Openness to Experience: Individuals who are intellectually curi- ous, sensitive to feelings, prone to fantasy, high in need-for-variety, and nondogmatic in values come to experience the world in complex and elaborated ways.

Clearly, the correlations between these two instru- ments are too low to permit us to equate the two constructs. There is more to ego development, some of which is probably best regarded as general intelligence, g: Intelligent individuals also experience the world in complex and elaborated ways. Is there more still, some unique contribution that measures of ego development make to the assessment of personality? This is a ques- tion of incremental validity, which needs to be ad- dressed by future research.

21

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

COMMENTARIES

Moral Thought, Moral Action, and Personality

There are no empirical studies of the relation of ego level to A and C, but the question is raised by Loevinger in her article: "With regard to the variable of conscien- tiousness, there is a direct confrontation between the five-factor model of personality structure and the con- ception of ego development."

Unfortunately, there is a terminological confusion here. Conscientiousness is not a single variable, but the same label applied by Loevinger to a stage of moral cognition and by five-factor theorists to a dimension of personality relevant to moral behavior (cf. Blasi, 1980). The two approaches are complementary.

Simply stated, ego level determines the form of im- pulse control, whereas C determines the degree of impulse control. Individuals who score high on C are (among other things) dutiful, that is, they adhere rigor- ously to their ethical standards. Whether these stan- dards are adopted mindlessly from the teachings of one's parents (conformist stage) or are the result of principled reasoning based on individual experience (conscientious stage) is irrelevant to standing on the dimension of C. An empirical study would probably show no correlation between C and ego level, and this would be theoretically appropriate.

From the perspective of the five-factor model, as- pects of at least three dimensions are needed to charac- terize moral thought and behavior. Openness to values is an aspect of 0 that contrasts conventional, tradi- tional, and dogmatic approaches to social and ethical issues with liberal, tolerant, and unconventional ap- proaches. It is the facet of 0 most strongly correlated with ego level (McCrae & Costa, 1980). Altruism, straightforwardness, and tender-mindedness are facets of A that reflect a prosocial orientation: Low scorers on these traits would be selfish, manipulative, and callous. Dutifulness and self-discipline are facets of C that have obvious implications for moral conduct.

The advantage of dimensional systems is that they allow a much more differentiated view than do stage models, which require that each individual be assigned to one and only one category. How do we characterize an individual who is both manipulative and exploitive in interpersonal relations as well as highly differenti- ated in thoughts and feelings? Opportunistic or auton- omous? Within a dimensional model it is easy to understand this person as one who is low in A and high in 0.

Traits and Master Traits

Loevinger does not deny that there are traits other than ego level, and she might even grant that factor

analysis could identify some of them. But she feels that ego level is the master trait which organizes and inte- grates all the others. This is an intriguing possibility; it suggests something about the structuring of traits within the individual, a topic that has been of great concern to critics of conventional personality research (Carlson, 1984).

In our view, Loevinger is both wrong and right on this point. She is right in recognizing that ego level (or the related dimensions of Openness and Intelligence) influences the expression of other traits; but she is wrong in assuming that only ego level has such a superordinate position. We suspect that all major per- sonality factors can be seen as master traits, because all of them condition the expression of other traits.

Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists might view N as the master trait, for they see the way negative affect colors every aspect of their patients' lives. If they are extraverts, their social life may show a desperate need for attention and reassurance from others; if they are introverts, they may be painfully shy. Patients who are open to experience may agonize over existential mean- inglessness; those who are closed may be distressed by their failure to have two cars and a house in the suburbs. But the lives of all are dominated by chronic anxiety, depression, and vulnerability-sometimes even to the point of suicide. Surely N has been the master trait in these cases!

But we might equally well argue that C is the master trait, because it determines the organization, drive, and effectiveness with which goals are pursued. Two equally open and intelligent individuals may share in- tellectual curiosity about a topic, but when one has become an eminent scholar, the other is still thinking about writing a book. The difference is conscientious- ness. Two agreeable people may care equally for the plight of the homeless, but one simply sighs, whereas the other organizes a relief project. With regard to the accomplishment of goals motivated by many different traits, C seems to be the master trait.

It is intellectually dangerous for any science to adopt a single method exclusively, regardless of the apparent success of the method. Contrasting approaches offer new ways of thinking about old problems that are not easily generated within the dominant paradigm. In this respect, we believe that Loevinger's work on sentence completion measures of ego level is a useful comple- ment to mainstream trait psychology. Its emphases on personality development, on the individual expression of traits, and on the internal structure of traits point to new questions that traditional factor models have typi- cally ignored. We hope that future personality psychol- ogists will address such questions not as an alternative to trait models, but as an elaboration of our basic knowledge about individual differences.

22

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: Ego Development and Trait Models of Personality

COMMENTARIES

Note

Paul T. Costa, Jr., Gerontology Research Center, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, 4940 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224.

References

Blasi, A. (1980). Bridging moral action and moral cognition: A critical review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 88, 1-45.

Carlson, R. (1984). What's social about social psychology? Where's the person in personality research? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1304-1309.

Cattell, R. B. (1957). A universal index for psychological factors. Psychologia, 1, 74-85.

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1985). The NEO Personality Inventory manuaL Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.

Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five- factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440.

Edwards, A. L. (1957). The social desirability variable in personality assessment and research. New York: Dryden.

Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1964). Manual of the Eysenck Personality Inventory. London: University Press.

Funder, D. C., & Colvin, C. R. (1988). Friends and strangers: Ac- quaintanceship, agreement, and the accuracy of personality judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 149-158.

Halverson, C. F., Kohnstamm, G. A., & Martin, R. P. (in press). The developing structure of temperament and personality from in- fancytoakdlhood Hillsdale,NJ:LawrenceErlbaumAssociates, Inc.

Harshman, R. A., & Berenbaum, S. A. (1981). Basic concepts under- lying the PARAFAC-CANDECOMP three-way factor analysis model and its application to longitudinal data. In D. H. Eichorn, J. A. Clausen, N. Haan, M. P. Honzik, & P. H. Mussen (Eds.), Present and past in middle life (pp. 435-459). New York: Academic.

Jackson, D. N., & Messick, S. (1961). Acquiescence and desirability as response determinants on the MMPI. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 21, 771-790.

Loevinger, J. (1966). The meaning and measurement of ego develop- ment. American Psychologist, 21, 195-206.

Lonky, E., Kaus, C. R., & Roodin, P. A. (1984). Life experience and mode of coping: Relation to moral judgment in adulthood. Developmental Psychology, 20, 1159-1167.

McCrae, R. R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1258-1265.

McCrae, R. R. (1989). Why I advocate the five-factor model: Joint analyses of the NEO-PI and other instruments. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 237-245). New York: Springer-Ver- lag.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1980). Openness to experience and ego level in Loevinger's Sentence Completion Test: Dis- positional contributions to developmental models of per- sonality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1179-1190.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1983). Social desirability scales: More substance than style. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psvchology, 51, 882-888.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1988). Age, personality, and the spontaneous self-concept. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 43, S177-S185.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1989). Different points of view: Self-reports and ratings in the assessment of personality. In J. P. Forgas & M. J. Innes (Eds.), Recent advances in socialpsychol- ogy: An international perspective (pp. 429-439). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1990). Personality in adulthood New York: Guilford.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (in press). Conceptions and correlates of Openness to Experience. In S. R. Briggs, R. Hogan, & W. H. Jones (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology. New York: Academic.

Nicholson, R. A., & Hogan, R. (1990). The construct validity of social desirability. American Psychologist, 45, 290-292.

Rest, J. R. (1979). Development in judging moral issues. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Small, S. A., Zeldin, R. S., & Savin-Williams, R. C. (1983). In search of personality traits: A multimethod analysis of naturally occur- ring prosocial and dominance behavior. Journal ofPersonality, 51, 1-16.

Vaillant, G. E., & McCullough, L. (1987). The Washington Univer- sity Sentence Completion Test compared with other measures of adult ego development. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 1189-1194.

Wiggins, J. S., & Pincus, A. L. (1992). Personality: Structure and assessment.AnnualReview ofPsychology, 43, 473-504.

Loevinger's Model and Measure of Ego Development: A Critical Review, II

Stuart T. Hauser Harvard Medical School

Fifteen years ago, from the vantage points of devel- opmental psychology and psychoanalysis, I reviewed several aspects of Jane Loevinger's approach to the study of ego development (Hauser, 1976). At that time, I, and many others, appreciated the breadth and com- plexity of Loevinger's conceptualization, creatively synthesizing contributions of several significant clini-

cal and developmental theorists (e.g., H. S. Sullivan, A. Freud, Piaget). Adding to the appeal of Loevinger's work was a feature setting it apart from all of her predecessors: Loevinger's model of ego development, describing a hierarchy of vertically connected stages and horizontally connected elements within stages, was in a "loop" with an empirical assessment technique and

23

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:19:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions