on when we are asked to describe ourselves, whether to a friend or on a
questionnaire. There has been considerable dispute about how we de -
velop a self-concept, whether or not self-concepts are accurate, and
what the possibilities are for change in the self-concept during adult -
hood. According to one view , the self-concept may be crystallized early
in life and remain unchanged thereafter.
Stories abound about middle-aged men who take up tennis or jog -
ging after 20 years of inactivity and have to revise drastically their image
of themselves as athletes. Normally they make these revisions fairlyquickly . They have to; they can’t fool their bodies. But could they stillimagine they were adventurous when they had lost their sense of dar -
ing? Could they still believe they were hostile when they had been mel -
lowed by experience and age? Would anything in their intrapsychic or
social experience force them to revise their self-concept, the way their
exhaustion forces them to acknowledge the limits of their physical en-durance?
Until we can answer these questions, the possiblity remains that all
that we have demonstrated is the stability of the self-concept. Further,this critique would apply equally to all studies, longitudinal and cross-sectional, that have relied on self-reports. In short, it would pull the rugout from under most of the claims of stability we have reviewed in thisbook and would allow the proponents of change to say , “See? People dochange with age and with experience, just as we’ve told you. Only theydon’t realize they’ve changed.”
In this case we cannot rely on evidence from self-reports, since they
are themselves in question. We have to get beyond self-reports, whichare determined by the self-concept, if we want to see the agreement be -
tween the self-concept and the true personality . For this we must turn
to someone else’s assessment of personality , and in our case we hadavailable personality ratings made by the husbands and wives of 281 ofour subjects (McCrae & Costa, 1982). We assumed that spouses werereasonable judges of personality (we had data to support that assump -
tion), but we also argued that the spouses would be much more able
than the individuals themselves to detect any changes that age hadbrought. We may be blind to changes in ourselves, but others who mustdeal with us on a daily basis are unlikely to overlook important changesin our personality .
By comparing self-reports with spouse ratings, we can get some
idea of whether the self-concept has really been crystallized. Among120 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD