around for well over a century , and contemporary theories ought, we
think, to begin with the established facts. It was not until we hadlearned a great deal about how traits function that we ventured our owntheory (McCrae & Costa, 1996, 1999).
The first and central fact that we had to deal with was the stability
of personality traits over long periods of time. Again and again, our as -
sertion that personality was stable was met with incredulity: How could
it possibly be true that personality remains the same, when life presentsa continuing stream of new experiences, new relationships, new oppor -
tunities and limitations on what we can do? It gradually occurred to us
that we used the word personality differently from many others, and
that traits (our principal interest) had to be sharply distinguished fromrelationships, habits, self-images, and so on. Something can change and
stay the same only if it has at least two distinct parts.
Oddly , that insight was the basis of not one but two new theories of
personality presented at a day-long 1992 American Psychological Asso-ciation symposium on the topic “Can Personality Change?” Dan McAdams(1992) argued that personality should be construed as occupying threelevels: Dispositional Traits, Personal Concerns, and Life Narratives. Heconceded that traits are largely stable but pointed out that personal con-cerns (current goals, plans, worries, etc.) and life narratives (people’sself-concept expressed as a life story) change with the situation andwith the point in the lifespan. McAdams regards these as essentially in-dependent levels, each requiring its own methods of study .
We (Costa & McCrae, 1994) presented a somewhat more ambi -
tious model that also distinguished between enduring and changing
parts of personality . Eventually (McCrae & Costa, 1999) we came to re -
gard these parts not as the separate levels of McAdams’s model but as in -
terconnected components of a personality system . (At the same time,
Mayer, 1995, was developing a systems-theory-based personality modelthat shows some resemblance to ours; Mischel and Shoda, 1995, havealso, and independently , offered a somewhat similar systems model.)We also articulated a series of postulates intended to describe how thecomponents acted and interacted with each other. We called the wholeconstruction a Five-Factor Theory (FFT) of personality , because it was
based on the whole body of findings associated with research on theFive-Factor Model (FFM). FFT began with observations of trait stabil -
ity , but it is supposed to explain much more.186 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD