 11. Personality Development across the Life Course 275
ket. A similar story could be told for Tom. 
Let’s assume that after 2 years he fails to 
handle the responsibilities of school and the 
sports team, parties too much, gets kicked 
off the team, and leaves school. By leaving 
school, he avoids the necessity of changing 
in a way to conform to the dual high expec -
tations for behaving more responsibly.
Figure 11.2  shows the hypothetical paths 
and cycles of person–  environment transac -
tions taken by Carol and Tom, and how 
attraction, selection, transformation, ma -
nipulation, and attrition play out over time. 
Along with these fundamental person– 
environment transactions, we highlight how 
lower-order TESSERA mechanisms help to 
explain both continuity and change. Sev -
eral observations about these transactions 
should be made. First, as we noted earlier, 
the majority of person–  environment trans -
actions result in continuity, not change (Nye 
& Roberts, 2019; Roberts, 2006). Attrac -
tion, selection, manipulation, and attrition 
should all go toward promoting continu -
ity, whereas, the only transaction linked 
to change would be transformation. This 
preponderance of continuity-  promoting 
person–  environment transactions may par -
tially explain why stability in personality is 
more commonly found than change.
A second observation is that our hypo -
thetical descriptions are oversimplified. In 
reality, Carol and Tom would be confront -
ing many different life paths and their req -
uisite environments and experiences si -multaneously. They would be dealing with 
experiences in romantic, family, and friend 
relationships, while attempting to man -
age work and achievement demands, along 
with experiences in domains such as health 
among other things. This means that any 
one event or experiences resulting from that 
event should be a minor factor in the larger 
tapestry of a person’s life, another reason 
why individual life events have such modest 
relations to personality change.
While the topics of person–  environment 
transactions and their putative effect on per -
sonality continuity and change have been the 
focus of theorizing for a number of decades, 
the level of empirical testing of these ideas 
has been quite limited. Person–  environment 
transactions such as selection, manipula -
tion, and attrition are some of the longest- 
standing but least-  tested ideas in personality 
development. The idea that being attracted 
to and selecting certain environments leads 
to greater personality consistency is widely 
accepted, as are the ideas of reactance, evoca -
tion, manipulation, and attrition. Nonethe -
less, the empirical linking of these transac -
tions to personality continuity, for example, 
is lacking. We know that people find envi -
ronments consistent with their personality 
traits and interests attractive (e.g., Acker -
man & Heggestad, 1997; Botwin, Buss, & 
Shackelford, 1997), but the idea that suc -
cessfully selecting a personality-  consistent 
environment is linked to greater continuity 
has not been thoroughly tested. There is a 
FIGURE 11.2. Person–  environment transaction cycles.AttritionManipulationEvent or
transition
AttractionTransformationExperience:
TESSERA
Selection Selection
Attraction