Despite the claim that people are able to transcend their environments,
it is all too easy to find individuals who seem to be wholly a product of ahistory of reinforcements.
For decades the debate has raged about which of these is the true
image of human nature. The idea that they might all contain an elementof truth is a truism that has captured the imagination of almost no one.But it forms the basis of another school: the psychology of traits, or in -
dividual differences. This perspective resists facile and sweeping gener -
alizations:
Are people basically selfish? Some are, some aren’t.
Are human beings intrinsically creative? Some are, some aren’t.
This position, which emphasizes the consistent differences of individu -
als, has always played a major role in both common sense and academic
psychology . It might also be seen as a philosophy of human nature it-self, one well suited to a pluralistic society (Costa & McCrae, 2000c).But it has not received much attention as a philosophical position, andfrom the beginning trait psychology has been regarded as a relativelyminor part of personality theory: not as a fourth school, but only a set ofpersonality measures, a few isolated studies, an appendix to one of the“true” schools.
One reason for this is that it has been possible to view individual
differences simply as one aspect of an all-encompassing theory . To thedegree that each of the other schools attempts to account for at leastsome individual differences, each incorporates the trait model. Classicalpsychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1900/1938), for example, proposed thatthe resolution of psychosexual conflicts in childhood and the develop -
ment of characteristic defenses led to enduring character traits, such as
those typifying the anal personality . For the psychoanalyst, neatness,punctuality , thrift, and cleanliness are viewed as the outcome of a fixa -
tion during the anal-retentive stage of development. Maslow , a represen -
tative humanist, defined individual differences in terms of levels of
basic motivation. Social learning theorists (Bandura, 1977), the contem -
porary descendants of behaviorists, might explain characteristics like
masculinity or femininity as the result of role-modeling and socializa -
tion processes.
In short, every theory of personality is concerned with the differ -
ences as well as the similarities among people. But the concern tends toA Trait Approach to Personality 23