Tracing Three Lines of Personality Development

Abstract

I would like the interdisciplinary field of human development to move the whole person from the periphery to the center of its inquiry. In doing so, the field would need to focus on three different lines of personality development, reflecting the perspectives of the person as (1) a social actor, (2) a motivated agent, and (3) an autobiographical author. The three perspectives bring together many different domains of inquiry in contemporary psychological and social sciences, from research on the genetic and epigenetic roots of dispositional traits to studies of how culture shapes people's self-defining life stories.