124 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
tinue to “work on” their narrative identities 
as they accumulate new experiences in life 
and as their perspectives on the past and the 
future continue to change.
At any given point in time, moreover, 
people’s narrative identities can be said to 
differ from each other in observable, mea -
surable ways (McAdams & McLean, 2013). 
As such, narrative identity is an important 
feature of personality itself (McAdams & 
Pals, 2006), and its development parallels 
the development of dispositional traits, mo -
tivations, and other features of human per -
sonality (McAdams & Olson, 2010).
McAdams (2015a, 2015b) has delineated 
three strands of personality development that 
run across the human life course. The first 
runs from early temperament inclinations to 
the full expression of dispositional person -
ality traits. In that personality traits mainly 
capture the different social–  emotional styles 
through which human beings perform their 
characteristic roles, this first line tracks the 
development of the person as a social actor . 
The second line of personality development 
runs from the emergence of a theory of mind 
in early childhood (wherein the child first 
conceives of the self as an agent who desires 
and plans) to the articulation of a motiva -
tional agenda—  life goals and values—  in the 
adult years, depicting the person as a moti -
vated agent . The third line features narrative 
identity, tracing how the person as an auto -
biographical author  comes to create an inte -
grative story of the self, beginning in adoles -
cence and running through old age. People begin life as social actors only. Eventually 
personality thickens beyond dispositional 
traits to encompass both the goals and val -
ues of the motivated agent and the narrative 
identity constructed by the autobiographical 
author. In personality development, then, 
life stories layer over goals and values, which 
layer over dispositional personality traits 
(McAdams, 2015a, 2015b), as indicated in 
Figure 5.1.
Scientific understanding of narrative iden -
tity has advanced considerably since the turn 
of the century. Within the field of personal -
ity psychology, the progress can be marked 
by noting four landmark papers, published 
between the years 2000 and 2016.
The first paper demonstrated the develop -
mental role of autobiographical reasoning  in 
the construction of a life story (Habermas 
& Bluck, 2000). In his original conception, 
McAdams (1985) asserted that the formula -
tion of a life story begins in adolescence with 
the emergence of what Piaget (1970) called 
formal operations. Following Erikson’s 
(1963) conception of identity in general, 
McAdams (1985) viewed the life story (nar -
rative identity) to be an internalized abstrac -
tion that presupposes the formal operational 
ability to imagine alternative life paths. In 
their authoritative review of the literature on 
cognitive development, Habermas and Bluck 
(2000) focused instead on more specific 
cognitive skills that enable the person to se -
quence memories of events into causal ac -
counts, derive general themes from specific 
episodes to characterize the self, and arrange 
Narrative Identity
Motivational Agenda
Dispositional TraitsLayer of Personality
Age (in years)0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
FIGURE 5.1. Three layers of personality development. Adapted from McAdams (2015a, p. 5).