forcement to explain behavior; more recently , social learning theories
(e.g., Bandura, 1977) have acknowledged the role of cognitive processesin shaping behavior. Humanistic psychologies (Maddi & Costa, 1972),which arose in reaction to what were perceived as the irrational andmechanistic biases of psychoanalytic and behavioral theories, empha -
size humankind’s capacity to think, love, and grow. Each of these ap -
proaches has made valuable contributions to personality psychology ,
and we say more about them later, especially in Chapter 8. Our currentconcern, however, is to draw attention away from them to an alternativeapproach to personality that we feel deserves more credit than it is nor -
mally given.
The major schools have been interpreted as representing three dif -
ferent philosophies of human nature that, for the sake of contrast, are
often depicted in oversimplified form. These caricatures of human na -
ture may not do justice to the intricacies of the theories themselves, es-
pecially in their contemporary forms, but they do highlight the basicconcerns of each perspective. From the psychoanalytic tradition, wemight infer that the individual is basically irrational, driven by animalinstincts, with rational control maintained only by the countervailingforces of socially induced guilt and anxiety . From a behaviorist perspec-tive, the individual is seen as less ominous and unpredictable; indeed,human nature is largely or wholly the result of experiences in the socialenvironment that shape and reward certain behaviors. People are reac-tive, habit-bound creatures of the environment they live in. Humanisticpsychologists endow people with a far more pleasing aspect; love, cre -
ativity , and play are thought to be the quintessential features of human
nature, and both irrationality and rigidity are interpreted as signs of thedestructive influence of society .
How is it that theorists who look at the same phenomenon—
human nature—draw such different conclusions about it?
One possibility that may account for this selective attention to the
facts about human nature is that people are different. Freudians holdthat the human species is naturally aggressive, and they have no troublepointing to infamous examples of the kind of humanity they envision.Rogerians (Rogers, 1961) believe in the capacity for openness and love,and they , too, find exemplars of their ideas. (Abraham Maslow , 1954,studied such self-actualizing individuals as Abraham Lincoln and Elea -
nor Roosevelt as a kind of counterbalance to the case studies of psychi -
atric patients that had formed the basis of Freudian psychology .)22 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD