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Subjective well-being (SWB) reflects the 
extent to which people think and feel that 
their lives are going well. This construct— 
which is often referred to more colloquially 
as happiness —plays a somewhat unusual 
role within personality psychology. On the 
one hand, neither the first two editions of 
this handbook nor Hogan, Johnson, and 
Briggs’s (1997) Handbook of Personality 
Psychology  included chapters on the topic 
(though these handbooks did address the 
topic of emotion). This absence suggests that 
well-being research did not play a central 
role in the history of personality theory. On 
the other hand, the strong influence of per -
sonality is seen as one of the most replicable 
and most surprising findings to emerge from 
the last four decades of research on SWB. In 
fact, Gilovich and Eibach (2001) suggested 
that to those outside the field, the relatively 
weak influence of situational factors and 
the relatively strong influence of personality 
factors should be one of the most counter -
intuitive findings from the entire domain of 
personality psychology. If the links between 
personality and SWB are so strong and so 
surprising, why hasn’t SWB research played 
a more important role in personality theory? 
Furthermore, why are personality effects in 
the SWB domain viewed as being so surpris -
ing in the first place?We believe that part of the answer to these 
questions comes when we consider the dual 
nature of the construct. SWB can be thought 
of both as an outcome for which individuals 
strive and part of a functional process that 
helps individuals to achieve other goals. In 
reference to the first point, William James 
(1902, p. 76) suggested that “how to keep, 
how to gain, how to recover happiness is . . . 
for most men at all times the secret motive 
for all they do.” We would argue that the 
only thing that James got wrong in this state -
ment is the suggestion that this motive is se -
cret. Most people agree that being happy is 
the ultimate goal toward which they strive. 
For instance, in one study, being happy was 
rated to be more important than having 
good health, a high income, or high levels 
of attractiveness, and it was rated as being 
more important than experiencing love 
or meaning in life (Diener & Oishi, 2004; 
Adler, Dolan & Kavetsos, 2017). Thus, hap -
piness is seen as an ultimate goal that guides 
individual choices and may be achieved if 
the external circumstances in a person’s life 
coincide with his or her desires.
When people conceptualize happiness 
in this way—as an outcome that can be 
achieved if things go well—they naturally 
think about it as something that can change. 
Not surprisingly, initial work in the area CHAPTER 34
Personality and  Subjective Well‑Being
Richard  E. Lucas  
Ed Diener