are Basic Tendencies rather than Characteristic Adaptations, however,
is. Many theorists have assumed or implied that traits are acquired, likebroad and generalized habits. Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, and Wetzel(1994), for example, distinguish between temperament and character.Although they might assign temperament traits to the category of BasicTendencies, they would probably consider character traits to be Charac -
teristic Adaptations. (Empirically , it seems to be hard to distinguish be -
tween temperament and character traits; both act like Basic Tendencies;
see Herbst, Zonderman, McCrae, & Costa, 2000). We will return to thedefense of this aspect of FFT later; for the present, we need to finish de -
scribing the theory .
As we will shortly see, there is another “component” to the FFT
model, consisting of Dynamic Processes that regulate the interaction of
the components in Figure 9. There are many such processes—for exam -
ple, perception, coping, role playing, reasoning, long-range planning—
but FFT says little about them. Something is happening; for the present,we are only interested in gaining an overview of the operation, not thedetails of how it works. In any case, many of those details will have tobe supplied by specialists in such fields as cognition, neuropsychology ,and attitude change.
Postulates of FFT: How the System Works
Table 16 lists the postulates of FFT as first formulated in 1996. We neednot be concerned with all of these postulates, but some of them requirecomment. The Origin, Development, Adaptation, and Interaction pos -
tulates are most central to understanding how we think personality op -
erates. In considering them it is useful to draw a picture, and Figure 10
serves that function. The arrows indicate the direction of influences,suggesting the operation of (unspecified) Dynamic Processes.
Figure 10 adds the dimension of time to Figure 9: It shows what
leads to what. Figure 10 operates on different time scales—that is, it canbe seen as a diagram of what is going on at any given moment, or it canbe seen as a diagram of how the individual develops over time, even thewhole lifespan.
Let us begin at the end, the output, the Objective Biography . This
consists of the cumulative record of everything the individual does andexperiences. What an individual does at any given moment, is, ofcourse, behavior , the phenomenon many psychologists believe we areA Five-Factor Theory of Personality 189