Capturing the Dynamic Nature of Personality

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Capturing the Dynamic Nature of Personality Carol S. Dweck Columbia University In this paper, I argue that the most important task confronting the field of personality is the task of capturing the dynamic, process-oriented nature of personality in a parsimonious fashion. I propose that this may best be accomplished by understanding people’s predominant goals and their strategies for pursuing those goals. Such a motivational analysis allows us to express coherent cognition-affect-behavior patterns that distinguish individuals from each other. However, because it also illuminates the underpinnings of important psychological phenomena in all individuals (e.g., helplessness, aggression), this analysis would be of interest even if everyone had the same personality. I illustrate these points by identifying major classes of goals and the cognition-affect-behavior patterns that are associated with them. I close by proposing that goals can provide a common language for those who take a process-oriented approach to personality, as well as common ground between personality and other fields of psychology.  1996 Academic Press, Inc.

The challenge ahead for personality theorists and researchers is to capture parsimoniously the dynamic, process-oriented nature of personality. Trait theorists have addressed some of the more static, descriptive aspects of personality—how people may be concisely described in terms of a set of global characteristics. However, we have not yet arrived at the point where we can succinctly express the more process-driven, context-sensitive patterns of personality. In this article I will propose that this may best be done by understanding people’s predominant goals, along with their beliefs about whether and how these goals can be realized. Virtually all of the classic theories of personality (e.g., Adler, 1927; Erikson, 1959; Freud, 1933/1964; Horney, 1945; Jung, 1933; Maslow, 1954; Rogers, 1961; Sullivan, 1953) had motivational contructs at their core. They all took as the starting point of personality (and of personality development) the question of what individuals are striving for. The problem with these theories, however, was that it was often difficult to operationalize their variables and to observe their workings in a rigorous fashion. Moreover, during the behaviorist era and the cognitive revolution that followed, most psychologists ceased grappling with issues of how to study motivation in human personality. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Carol S. Dweck, Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York NY 10027. 348 0092-6566/96 $18.00 Copyright  1996 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Recently, however, a motivational analysis of personality has re-emerged, with goals and goal-like concepts as its basis (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Carver & Scheier, 1982; Emmons, 1986; Epstein, 1990; Ford, 1992; Frese & Sabini, 1985; Klinger, 1977; Kuhl & Beckmann, 1985; Little, 1989; Markus & Ruvolo, 1989; Pervin, 1983; Read & Miller, 1989a; see also Mischel & Shoda, 1995). In this view, goals are the forces that drive, select, direct, and organize our behavior (Emmons, 1989; Ford, 1992; Pervin, 1983; see also Adler, 1927; Allport, 1937; McDougall, 1908; Murray, 1938; Tolman, 1932). Looked at another way, our most meaningful affect, cognition, and behavior occur and cohere in relation to our goals: Strong emotions are about positive and negative events of relevance to the things we value and strive for; vigorous thought is typically in the service of such things as understanding, planning for, fantasizing about things we hope for and seek (or fear and wish to avoid); and, clearly, much of our action is in the service of carrying us closer to the attainment of valued goals (see, e.g., Barsalou, 1983; 1991; Fiske, 1992; James, 1890; Klinger; 1977; Kruglanski, 1990; Kunda, 1987; Pervin, 1983; Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994). A motivational analysis of this sort not only describes and names what people do, but it also tells us something about how people work. For example, as we will see, when we are trying to understand aggression or self-defeating behavior, the motivational analysis attempts not only to describe the pattern of behavior, but also to identify the psychological processes that underlie it: What goals is the individual pursuing and by what means? How are these goals and means setting up the affect, cognition and behavior that characterize the pattern in question? (see Pervin, 1995). I will use the goal analysis to make a number of points. First, goals allow us to detect and study coherent patterns of affect, cognition, and behavior as we seek to understand personality. They thus allow us to use all of the elements available to us as psychologists. Then I will discuss how goals are both individual difference variables and variables that are highly contextually sensitive. They thus can help us understand when people will be similar and when they will be different. In addition, I will argue that because goals provide the when, why, and how of behavior, we would look to them to understand variations in behavior even if everyone had the same “personality.” I will go on to propose that goals can provide a common language for those who take a process-oriented approach to the study of personality, as well as a common ground between personality and other fields of psychology. For example, the directing and organizing function of goals has become clear within cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and social psychology, and these fields can all readily make contact with personality via the study of goals. In addition, the study of goals within personality, by leading to a clear analysis of adjustment or adaptation problems, links personality directly to abnormal psychology and to psychotherapy. I go on to suggest how goals can provide a conceptual framework for understanding the effect of culture on personality. Finally, I argue that a

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goal analysis, by allowing us to conceptualize development in terms of stageappropriate goals and strategies, links personality directly to developmental psychology. Goals allow us to study all the elements available to psychologists. When I entered psychology, it was still the era of radical behaviorism. What went on unseen inside the person was not the proper province of science. Several years later, cognition made its debut as a worthy topic, and affect soon followed suit. I could not have been more delighted. Now, I thought naively, we psychologists would have all the elements we needed to understand people. For example, we could now begin to understand how cognition and affect worked in concert to affect behavior. But, with noteworthy exceptions, this is not what happened. Many of those who studied behavior continued to study behavior. Those who began to study cognition studied only cognition, and many of those who began to study affect studied affect alone. The problem, of course, was what to do with all these variables. How was one to study them simultaneously, while still preserving a modicum of precision and clarity? A goal analysis allows us to make use of all the elements at our disposal and it allows us to do it in a manageable way. Specifically, a goal analysis leads us to see affect, cognition and behavior as forming coherent patterns, ones that are driven and organized by people’s goals. And once we start looking for these patterns, they begin to become apparent. Definition of goals and basic classes of goals. First, however, it is necessary to define what is meant by a goal and to pinpoint the level of analysis that appears most useful. By “goal” I mean the purpose for which an individual is pursuing a behavior. This is similar to what Emmons (1989) means when he refers to what individuals are “trying to do.” A goal is also often defined as a desired end point that an individual is seeking, but my concern, as described below, is that this definition may focus one on the too-concrete or too-proximal aim of the individual rather than on the more underlying purpose of the behavior. What is the most useful level of analysis for goals? Goal is often used to refer to the concrete end a person a person seeks, such as money. However, money can be sought for many different purposes—for self-validation, as a means to desired material goods, as a means to help others—and it is these purposes, I will argue, that will determine the character of the goal striving. Since we are interested in the patterns of affect, cognition, and behavior that goals produce, I suggest that we seek the highest level at which classes of goals can be linked to unique, meaningful patterns. Below, I delineate the classes of goals for which there is evidence of unique and coherent allied patterns. I focus particularly on patterns representing phenomena of longstanding, general interest to the field, such as helplessness and aggression, and I offer many illustrations from our own work, in which we have sought to relate goals to coherent patterns of cognition, affect, and behavior. (Interestingly, the classes of goals I have identified have

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much in common with the motives categories into which Emmons & King, 1989, group their personal strivings.) The first classes of goals fall under the umbrella of achievement/competence goals. Here, two distinct classes of goals have been identified: performance goals (in which the aim is to prove, validate, obtain positive judgments of one’s competence) and learning goals (in which the aim is to improve one’s competence, e.g., by understanding new things, mastering new tasks, acquiring new skills) (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). A great deal of research has now shown that the pursuit of the two classes of goals can have a very different character (see Ames & Archer, 1988; Dweck & Elliott, 1983; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Nicholls, 1984). When a performance goal, with its focus on measuring competence, is paramount (and particularly when expectancy of success is uncertain or low), individuals often avoid challenging tasks and are vulnerable to helpless responses to failure: attributions to lack of ability, negative affect, lowered persistence and impaired problem-solving strategies. In contrast, when a learning goal is predominant, individuals are more likely to seek challenging learning opportunities and to display a mastery-oriented response to failure: a focus on effort or strategy, positive affect, and maintenance of effective problem-solving strategies. It is important to note that everyone pursues both classes of achievement goals at various times and that both can potentially promote vigorous striving. However, when one predominates, it appears to lend the goal striving a particular character. The next classes of goal can be seen as interpersonal or relationship goals (see, e.g., Emmons, 1989; Ford, 1992; McAdams, 1985;). Here, we can start with two classes of goals that are analogous to performance and learning goals in that one involves striving for validation, whereas the other focuses on development. Thus, the first class of interpersonal goals would include goals relating to seeking approval, acceptance, and liking. The second class (“development goals‘) would involve a focus on building relationships, and would include such things as seeking intimacy, helping others, seeking to improve one’s relationship skills. Research from a variety of quarters suggests that these are meaningfully distinct interpersonal goals with distinct allied patterns. For example, Erdley, Cain, Loomis, Dumas-Hines, and Dweck (in press) have recently shown that, just as in the achievement domain, approval goals are more likely to produce helpless reactions to rejection, whereas development goals are more likely to produce mastery-oriented responses (such as a focus on attributions to controllable factors, maintenance of positive affect, and increased self-disclosure). Other recent work has supported similar distinctions between these different types of relationship goals (Cantor, Norem, Langston, Zirkel, Fleeson & Cook-Flanagan, 1991; Read & Miller, 1989c; Sanderson & Cantor, 1995). Another class of relationship goals that has been shown to be predictive of distinct cognition, affect, behavior patterns involves the goals of dominating or controlling others or seeking power over others. In the developmental psychology

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literature there is increasing evidence that this type of goal can be predictive of aggression (Dodge, 1993; Erdley, in press). Specifically, those who are highly concerned with dominating and controlling others appear highly sensitive to actions that may question their status, and appear to respond with hostile attributions, anger and retaliation. There is related evidence from the extensive work on power motivation that this class of goals predicts a tendency toward hostility and aggression (Winter, 1988; 1993; see also McAdams, 1985). As we noted with achievement/competence goals, all of the foregoing classes of goals are universal in that virtually everyone pursues them to some extent at some time. Moreover, all of them are capable of fueling vigorous striving. However, the different classes of goals create different vulnerabilities, and these characteristic vulnerabilities are most likely to appear when a class of goals predominates over other goals (either because that class of goals is paramount to the individual or because the situation renders that class of goals paramount). The final classes of goals I will identify are hedonic goals, those that focus on pleasure and pain or on concrete rewards and punishments. These, again, are goals we all pursue to some extent, but, again, when they become predominant, they take on a unique character. For example, the literature is replete with examples of “impulsive” behavior driven by a focus on rewards (e.g., Newman, 1987; Wallace, Newman, & Bachorowski, 1991). There is also compelling research on the negative correlates of working for extrinsic rewards as a characteristic style (Harter & Jackson, 1992; Kasser & Ryan, 1993), even when the goaloriented behavior is planful and sustained. Finally, there is an extensive and important literature in which extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are manipulated, showing the undermining effects of working for extrinsic rewards (Deci & Ryan, 1985). It should be noted that all of these classes of goals may have “approach” forms, as well as “avoidance” forms (for example approaching positive judgments vs avoiding negative judgments or approaching pleasure vs avoiding pain) and these different forms may well have distinctive characteristics (Gray, 1986; Carver, this issue). Although I have dealt with these goals as though people pursue them one at a time, this has merely been for the sake of simplicity. We all pursue many goals simultaneously, and it can be cogently argued that one of the hallmarks of adaptive functioning is the ability to coordinate our goal pursuits so that we may successfully pursue many valued goals at the same time (Dodge, Asher, & Parkhurst, 1989; Dweck, in press; Emmons, 1988; Peterson, 1989). Underlying “needs” vs goals. There is much fascinating and valuable theorizing on the basic needs from which goals flow and which they may serve. Different theorists postulate different basic needs and among the most prominently featured are self-esteem, autonomy, belonging/relatedness, competence, and control/ safety/security (see, e.g., Deci & Ryan, 1991; Emmons, 1989). If indeed there are such basic needs, an important task for the future would be to understand

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how they manifest themselves in various goals to affect people’s behavior. Nevertheless, our focus would still be on the goals in which they are manifest, for as we have noted, this is the level of analysis at which unique patterns appear to emerge. Goals vs values. It is also important to distinguish goals from values. Values can be seen as more abstract and latent psychological variables—the importance that the individual ascribes to something. The more value one ascribes to something, the more, theoretically, it has the power to drive goals. However, goals are the actual manifestations of values in one’s strivings. Goals vs attributions. An attributional analysis has been used to explain some of the same phenomena for which I have used a goal analysis. For example, ability vs effort attributions have been used to explain helplessness (Diener & Dweck, 1978), and hostile attributions have been used to explain aggression (Dodge, 1993). What is the relation between these two approaches? While affirming the important role of attributions in these phenomena, I suggest, based on the research reviewed above, that people’s goals play a critical role in setting up their attributions. I argue that goals help create the meaning system or framework within which outcomes are interpreted. For example, we have shown that experimentally inducing performance vs learning achievement goals (Elliott & Dweck, 1988) or approval vs development social goals (Erdley et al., in press) produces helpless vs mastery-oriented attributions. As we have noted, there is also evidence that social dominance and control goals predict hostile attributions and aggression. It would be interesting to manipulate these goals experimentally to determine whether they can produce the associated attributions and reactions. In summary, the position taken here is that people interpret and react to what happens to them in terms of the goals they are pursuing. Individual differences and similarities. As I have suggested, virtually all people share the basic classes of goals I have described. People differ, however, in the relative emphasis they place on them and on the means they use to pursue them. Thus a goal analysis tells us the ways in which people are similar—at a fundamental level most of us value the same classes of goals. It also tells us when we can expect people to behave similarly—e.g., when a particular situation makes certain goals or means very salient so that most people adopt those goals or means. For example, as noted above, in our own research we have experimentally induced performance vs learning goals (Elliott & Dweck, 1988) and social approval vs development goals (Erdley et al., in press). Such an analysis of similarities is illuminating because it tells us how people work when they are pursuing a certain goal (what affects, cognitions and behaviors they will display; what mediational processes are at play) quite apart from how people differ from each other. Thus, even if all people were exactly the same, they would act differently when they had different goals, and we would still want to understand these processes. That is, we would still want to know the processes underlying helplessness or aggression.

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The goal analysis also tells us when we can expect people to be different from each other: when situations elicit their different goal/means priorities. But it also tells us why—what processes are set in motion when a particular goal or means is elicited. What individual difference variables are most useful? Given our analysis, it follows that the most useful individual difference variables would be ones that tell us something about people’s goals, i.e., the degree to which, when, and the means by which an individual tends to pursue particular classes of goals. Such individual difference variables may relate very directly to people’s goal choices (as with variables that actually tap goal preferences) or they might be variables that orient people toward particular goals (such as beliefs that make certain goals more salient or valued). I will illustrate these points with respect to theory and research on the self. The case of the self: Integrating the self in terms of goals. Many theorists of the self have begun to stress its dynamic nature, and self-concepts are increasingly discussed in terms of their relation to people’s goals (Breckler & Greenwald, 1986; Cantor, Markus, Niedenthal & Nurius, 1986; Markus & Ruvolo, 1989; Read & Miller, 1989b; Carver & Scheier, 1982; see also Gollwitzer & Wicklund, 1985; Higgins, 1987; Trzebinski, 1989). However, major self-related variables continue to have a static nature in many quarters. Prominent among these is selfesteem, which is still most often treated as something that people have rather than as something that people seek (see Cantor, 1990). I argue that although there are important things to be learned by looking at individuals’ chronic levels of self-regard, much can be learned by conceiving of self-esteem in terms of dynamic goal variables: What goals do people tend to pursue in order to feel good about themselves? Does a given individual strive to feel good about the self primarily by seeking validation from others, by engaging in growth-producing activities, or by seeking power and status? Looked at in this way, we could then ask whether pursuing self-esteem via these different types of goals is associated with different patterns of cognition, affect, and behavior? What are the costs and benefits of pursuing self-esteem in these different ways? Do some ways of pursuing self-esteem lead to more stable self-regard than do others? (For example, is approval-based self-esteem more fragile than growth-based self-esteem?) Thus self-esteem can be seen as something most people want and something they seek in characteristic ways. Indeed, there are several excellent examples of the utility of looking at selfesteem in dynamic, motivational terms. Tesser’s Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory (Tesser & Campbell, 1983) and Wicklund and Gollwitzer’s Symbolic Self-Completion Theory (e.g., Gollwitzer & Wicklund,1985) both explore the strategies people use to build and maintain their self-esteem. The research growing out of the these theories provides extensive documentation of the lengths people go to repair their self-esteem in the face of threat, and lends support to the idea that self esteem is not a personal possession, but a life-long goal (or set of goals)

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that we pursue (see also Greenwald & Pratkinis, 1984; Jones & Berglas, 1978; Schlenker & Weingold, 1989; Steele, 1988). Another area of self-relevant research that could benefit from a more extensive goal analysis is the self-efficacy literature. Although the research in this area explicitly addresses people’s self-efficacy with regard to their “goals,” goals are used in the sense of level of aspiration, and there is little distinction among classes of goals. Yet, other research shows the critical importance of considering the class of goal the individual is pursuing when assessing the beneficial effects of efficacy and related variables. For example, in our own work, we find that when individuals are pursuing learning goals (the goal of increasing their competence) their level of confidence in their present ability is not important (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). They seek challenging tasks and pursue them in a mastery-oriented manner whether their confidence in their present ability is high or low. It is only when individuals are pursuing performance goals (the goal validating their competence) that the level of perceived ability becomes important (see also Wood and Bandura, 1989). In a related vein, Kasser and Ryan (1993) have studied a group of people who are extremely high in efficacy beliefs, but who nonetheless show poor adjustment and a compromised sense of well-being. These are people for whom goals relating to wealth and material gain are more central than other self-related goals. Thus an interesting issue for research would be the extent to which the impact of efficacy beliefs varied as a function of the class of goals the individual is pursuing. An area of great productivity and influence in the realm of the self is the area of working self-concepts—multiple selves and possible selves (Markus & Ruvolo, 1989). These constructs are explicitly motivation-based. A possible self is seen as the mechanism through which individuals personalize their goals and image their enactment (Markus & Ruvolo, 1989). Indeed, much of the research on working self-concepts is basically about the different goals people have in the different areas of their lives or in the different roles they assume in different settings. It would thus be fascinating to combine this area with our present analysis of goals. If we more explicitly look at this research in terms of the classes of goals people are pursuing and how they are doing so, a number of interesting questions arise. What is the impact of having possible selves that fall more in line with approval-related goals vs growth-related goals vs hedonic goals? Are multiple selves that are allied with certain classes of goals more easily integrated? For example, is it easier to integrate growth-oriented goals across the realms of one’s life than it is to integrate approval-oriented goals? In other words, is it more likely that we will experience conflicts across domains (peers vs parents, family vs career) if we are focused on pleasing others and obtaining approval than if we are seeking to learn from and develop our skills and relationships in the various domains? Finally, there are many other self-conceptions that have motivational meaning, such as gender role concepts (Deaux, 1985) or individualistic vs collectivistic

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self-conceptions (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989). (See also Kelly’s, 1955, theory of personal constructs and Epstein’s, 1990, cognitive-experiential self-theory; cf. McAdams, 1993.) Indeed it would be difficult to argue that a self-conception was a central one if it did not have motivational implications. In our own work, we have shown that certain theories about the self (i.e., whether self-attributes are conceived of as fixed traits or malleable qualities) have direct consequences for the classes of goals individuals pursue (Dweck, 1991; Dweck & Leggett, 1988). This strategy of investigating different self-conceptions and their allied goals/strategies would seem to be a potentially fruitful way of approaching cross-cultural research on the self. Thus a goal analysis can serve as a way of organizing and integrating research on the self (see also Pervin, 1983; Read & Miller, 1989a). This would be an extremely exciting prospect. In addition to research on the self, other key areas of interest to personality psychologists lend themselves readily to a goal analysis, for example, interpersonal relations. Indeed there have been several very fruitful analyses of dyadic interactions in terms of the goals and goal structures that individuals bring to the interaction (Peterson, 1989; Read & Miller, 1989b; Trzebinski, 1989). As suggested above for the self, this type of analysis would seem to be particularly useful in analyzing cross-cultural interactions, where each participant’s actions may interpreted within the framework of the other’s beliefs and goals. Goals provide a common language for social-cognitive theorists. A great strength of the trait approach to personality is that the researchers have a common language. A great weakness of the more social-cognitive approaches is that the researchers, although like-minded in many ways, often do not share a common language or a common unit of analysis. Most of these systems, however, have a strong motivational component, and a translation into goals at the same level of analysis would be highly useful. This would represent a large step toward having a more unified approach to the study of dynamic personality. Goals provide a common language with other areas of psychology. Motivation has once again become of central concern across many areas of psychology, and goal constructs can provide a way of linking the findings of personality psychologists with the findings in these other fields. The most clear-cut example is the link between personality and social psychology. Personality psychologists have typically measured individual differences to unearth underlying processes and principles, whereas social psychologists have typically manipulated situations for the same purpose. Goals can go both ways. Once a goal and its allied pattern are clearly specified, they can be measured as individual differences or manipulated situationally (see, e.g., Dweck & Elliott, 1988). Thus, particularly for the important phenomena that are clearly of interest to both fields (e.g., aggression, achievement, and relationships, as well as the self), goals can provide a common unit of analysis. Moreover, there are areas of social psychology that are natural candidates for

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a goal analysis. For example, attitude researchers, although deeply interested in the question of the attitude-behavior relation (how and when attitudes guide behavior) do not tend to place people’s attitudes in the context of their goals. I suggest that attitudes (as values and evaluations) turn into behavior chiefly when they are embedded in individuals’ goal structures. Again, such an analysis could provide a meeting ground for personality and social psychologists. There has always been a natural alliance between personality psychology and abnormal psychology/psychotherapy. The goal analysis is a most useful one in this alliance, for it allows us to pinpoint and understand breakdowns in functioning in terms of such things as the relative absence of appropriate goals/strategies, conflicts among goals, or the premature abandoning of goals in the face of conflict or difficulty (Dweck, in press; Emmons, 1988; Pervin, 1983). The goal approach also leads us to look for the roots of people’s goals in their belief systems, another mode of analysis that has been common to both fields (see, e.g., Beck, 1976). Cognitive psychologists, after decades of disembodied thought, have begun to realize that much of the thinking people do is in the service of action, and hence have begun to introduce goal constructs into their theory and research. Barsalou (1983, 1991), for example, has argued that understanding the nature of categories requires us to understand the purpose for which they were constructed and has shown that many of our categories are constructed to achieve goals (see also Medin, 1986). Researchers in the are of cross-cultural psychology refer to the meaning systems that cultures create (Morris & Peng, 1994; Ruzgis & Grigorenko, 1994; Shweder, 1991). If a meaning system can be taken to represent the beliefs and values of the people in a culture, then this view is highly compatible with the present analysis. We would then seek to determine how the beliefs and values of different cultures affect the goals that were pursued and the means by which they were pursued. For example, we might expect that different classes of goals would be differentially valued (for example, goals that involve personal growth vs approval), that the social agents figuring most prominently in one’s goals might differ (peers vs elders, individuals vs groups), and that the ways in which one sought to attain the same class of goals might vary (approval though individual achievement vs facilitation of the group). It would be fascinating to see whether, despite the many differences across cultures in beliefs and values, a goal analysis revealed interesting commonalities in the basic principles underlying personality processes. Motivational processes have long been of great interest to biologically-oriented psychologists and neuroscientists. In a recent book (Damasio, 1994), the neurologist Antonio Damasio uses neurological case studies and laboratory experiments to argue for the role of motivation and emotion in our ability to make rational decisions and to function effectively: “reasoning strategies revolve around goals, options for action, predictions of future outcomes, and plans for implementation of goals at varied time scales” (p. 84). The compelling neurological cases he

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presents (cases of altered personality, but intact “intellectual” ability) are cases of motivational systems gone awry, in which the wrong goals get priority or in which individuals have become unable to choose strategies that would best serve their goals. This kind of work shows that it is not just cognitive psychology, but also personality psychology, that can form a beneficial alliance with the new neuroscience approaches. Through such an alliance we can come to understand more about the ways affect and cognition interact and are brought to bear on goal-oriented behavior. Developmental psychologists have begun to conceive of development as involving a succession of goals or goal structures over the life span, with growth consisting of the appropriate de-emphasis of old goals/strategies and adoption of new ones (Baltes & Staudinger, in press; Damon, in press; cf. Siegler, 1989). This is consistent with the views of classic theorists of personality development (e.g., Erikson, 1959), who see the individual as confronting different tasks armed with different competencies at differing points in the life course. A goal approach to the study of development has many advantages. This process analysis allows us to arrive at a more precise, sophisticated understanding of adaptive functioning and growth over the phases of development, and by doing so, it allows us to gain a handle on the factors that influence adaptive functioning and growth. For example, we can ask what kinds of socialization experiences predict an emerging emphasis on more or less adaptive goals and strategies at a given point in development. Another advantage would be that researchers studying adult personality and researchers studying personality development would at last be operating within the same general framework, and this is a tremendously exciting prospect. Conclusion. In summary, I have argued that the goal approach holds the promise of allowing us to capture the dynamic, process-driven nature of personality. It allows us to express, within the same framework, coherent cognition-affectbehavior patterns that can distinguish individuals from each other and that can describe variations in an individual over time and situations. That is, as Pervin (1983) notes, it can portray the more stable aspects of personality along with the more fluid ones. Moreover, I have argued that a goal approach can provide an important link between the field of personality and other areas of psychology. REFERENCES Adler, A. (1927). The practice and theory of individual psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Allport, F. H. (1937). Teleonomic description in the study of personality. Character and Personality, 5, 202–214. Ames, C., & Archer, J. (1988). Achievement goals in the classroom: Students’ learning strategies and motivation processes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 260–267. Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (in press). Interactive minds in a life-span perspective: Prologue. In P. B. Baltes & U. M. Staudinger (Eds.), Interactive minds: Life-span perspectives on the social foundation of cognition. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition, 11, 211–227.

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