from which the closed individual would be insulated. The changes
might be in either direction: Some open people might discover reasonsto become more sociable, whereas others might find new meaning insolitude. The former would become more extraverted; the latter, moreintroverted. We would not, therefore, expect an overall increase or de -
crease. But we would expect that people high in Openness would be less
predictable over time: Retest correlations should be lower for them thanfor people low in Openness.
The 6-year N, E, and O data and the 3-year A and C data gathered
in the BLSA in the 1980s provided the basis for a test of that appealinghypothesis (McCrae, 1993). The median retest correlation for theclosed half of the sample was .79, showing the high stability predictedfor this group. But the median retest correlation for the open half of thesample was .80, demonstrating equally high stability of personality . Thisanalysis offers no support for the hypothesis.
McCrae (1993) used the same design with three other variables
that were potential moderators of change. Private self-consciousness
(Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975) refers to a tendency to be introspec-tive and interested in understanding oneself. (This construct must bedistinguished from neurotic self-consciousness, which refers to feelingsof discomfort in social situations.) Because people high in private self-consciousness know themselves well, they may be more consistent intheir self-descriptions and thus show higher stability coefficients. Per-
sonal agency (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989) is a cognitive construct that
concerns the way people think about their own behavior. People high inpersonal agency view behaviors as steps toward long-term goals, where -
as people low in personal agency take a more immediate and concrete
view. For example, the act of making a will might be seen by a personhigh in personal agency as facing one’s mortality and taking care of one’slong-term responsibilities, whereas it might be seen by a person low inpersonal agency only as signing a paper. Because personality question -
naires ask about relatively abstract and enduring traits, they may be an -
swered more consistently over time by people high in personal agency .
Self-monitoring (Snyder, 1979) is the tendency to watch what one is
doing and modify it to fit the situation. At best, high self-monitors aresocially sensitive and functionally flexible people; at worst, they areother-directed chameleons without any enduring principles of theirown. Because they can change to suit the occasion, high self-monitorsmight be expected to be lower in trait stability .
In brief, none of these hypotheses was supported. When dividedQualifications and Rival Hypotheses 129