assignments, evaluate performance, train new employees, and so on.
Much of her behavior—at least during business hours—can be attrib -
uted to her role as supervisor.
Some psychologists take the view that personality is, or is largely ,
the collection of roles one plays. To one who maintains such a concep -
tion, the contention that personality is stable must seem somewhat silly .
Don’t people become parents and then grandparents? Don’t they retireor make midcareer shifts? Doesn’t age increase the probability that onewill adopt the sick role? Of course. If one adopts a role theory of per -
sonality , the whole issue of stability becomes trivial.
Other psychologists, also influenced by social-role theories, distin -
guish between roles and a deeper layer of personality , but they expect
that acting out certain roles will lead to changes in at that deeper level.The man who takes a job as a policeman may become authoritarian, sothe theory goes, because everyone thinks he is and treats him accord-ingly (G. H. Mead, 1934). In laboratory settings, this kind of manipula-tion can induce changes in people’s reports of what they are like, andsocial psychologists have sometimes asserted that age-related “role tran-sitions . . . must continuously redefine our personalities” (Veroff, 1983,p. 341), especially in old age (M. M. Baltes & Schmid, 1987).
Our findings of stability present a problem for this theory . As-
suming that our measures are taken seriously , two possibilities emergeas likely explanations. The first is that because role changes are not aspronounced as we might have thought, they leave personality basicallyunaltered. Perhaps the change from mother to grandmother is not verysignificant in comparison with differences between fathers and mothers.Again, retirement from an occupation may not be a radical change if, asHavighurst, McDonald, Maculen, and Mazel (1979) have shown, manypeople continue their professional activities after formal retirement. Ageroles do not seem to be a major influence on social identity as seen inthe spontaneous self-concept (McCrae & Costa, 1988a). The secondpossible interpretation is that this role-based theory of personality influ -
ences is simply wrong. Perhaps people do not internalize the percep -
tions others have of them, laboratory studies notwithstanding. Swann
and Hill (1982) showed that subjects given feedback inconsistent withtheir own conceptions of their personality traits changed their images ofthemselves—but only until they were given a chance to reassert them -
selves. By distinguishing between Characteristic Adaptations and Basic212 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD