Reassessing the History of Ambivalence toward the Study of Individual Lives 193and Atwood (1979), Alexander (1990), and Demorest and
Siegel (1996) turned personality on its head by arguing that
personality theories have personal and subjective origins in
the lives of their creators.
In 1997, Nasby and Read (1997) published a truly land-
mark case study of Dodge Morgan, who at the age of 54 sold
his electronics business for $41 million, commissioned con-
struction of a sailboat, and then completed a 150-day nonstop
solo circumnavigation of the earth (see Morgan, 1989, for his
own account of the voyage). Nasby and Read integrated a
rich and diverse array of quantitative and qualitative data:
numerous personality tests, administered before and after
(and in some cases during) the voyage; Morgan’s voyage log,
content-analyzed for a variety of themes and personality
characteristics; and Morgan’s letters and later memoir (1989)
of the voyage.
Motives That Drive Psychologists to Study Individuals
Considering all these trends together, it seems that—even
when highly abstract and nomothetic perspectives such as the
five-factor model of traits are enjoying great popularity—
there is also a revival of interest in studies of individual
persons within contemporary personality psychology. It is
worthwhile to speculate about some reasons for the coexis-
tence of these two very different trends.
Vivid Persons. First, the world is populated with many
vivid and arresting persons, people who compel our attention
because their lives depart so extensively from the ordinary
courses. History and today’s headlines are full of people whose
behaviors—hence their personalities—cry out for explanation
and understanding because they are so strange or at least do
not “make sense” by fitting into a coherent pattern. Thus, the
enigma of Adolf Hitler’s personality continues to drive inter-
pretations, psychological and otherwise, more than 55 years
after his death, as testified to by the comprehensive review of
Hitler biographies and psychobiographies by Rosenbaum
(1998), Kershaw (1999), and L. L. Langer (1999).
To take three more contemporary examples: What features
of the personality of Theodore Kaczynski led him to become
the “Unabomber,” mailing meticulously-designed explosive
packages to a miscellaneous group of people (e.g., technol-
ogy executives and at least one psychologist) as a protest
against the effects of technology? Why did Timothy McVeigh
in 1995 blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, killing 168 people (including 15 little children in a day-
care center) and injuring more than 500 others? And finally,
what personality dynamics led the mysterious figures of
Mohamed Atta and his cohort to commit suicide and mass
murder by hijacking jet airliners to fly into the World Trade
Center towers, the Pentagon, and whatever target they in-
tended for the plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania on
September 11, 2001 (Yardley, 2001)?
Often, however, there are people who will never make
headlines or draw lengthy obituaries; yet they fascinate and
perplex their friends and acquaintances. Thus, Gordon Allport
was drawn to the personality of his college roommate’s
mother, Jenny Gove Masterson (a pseudonym that Allport
used in place of her real name), as they corresponded over a
period of 11 years. (As Winter, 1993, suggests, perhaps this
was because she resembled in some ways his own mother and
cast him in the role of “good son,” in comparison to her own
son. Unconsciously, Allport may even have experienced his
roommate as a kind of “double.”) After Jenny’s death, Allport
used the letters as case materials in his teaching and later pub-
lished them, first as journal articles (Anonymous, 1946) and
then, near the end of his own life, as a book (Allport, 1965).
At least two of his students attempted quantitative analyses of
Jenny’s personality, based on some of her letters (Baldwin,
1942; Paige, 1966). In the book version of her letters, Allport
discussed a variety of personality interpretations of Jenny.
Clearly, for Allport, Jenny was an exceptionally vivid person,
someone who drew his attention and mobilized his most
strenuous explanatory powers. As he put it in the preface:
“Invariably she pins me down with the unspoken challenge,
‘And what do you make ofme?’ ” (Allport, 1965, p. x; em-
phasis in original). In such circumstances, everyone feels
compelled to explain (thus graduate students—in psychology,
anyway—often feel this compulsion with respect to their
mentors!). To Allport, the psychologist “has a curiosity that
drives him further, sometimes even to the point of indelicacy”
(p. 157).
When we try to explain such vivid and compelling people
with the usual resources of the personality psychologist’s
“toolbox” of nomothetic variables, the results can be quite
unsatisfying—a hollow portrait. For example, a description
of the Unabomber’s personality in terms of the popular five-
factor model of traits might run as follows: low surgency (at
least in face-to-face interactions), low agreeableness, high
conscientiousness, and high neuroticism. (His level on fac-
tor 5, openness to experience, can be debated. Was it high, as
reflected in the broad erudition in his “manifesto,” or was it
perhaps low because of the rigidity of his ideas?) While this
trait profile may be consistent with his behavior, it actually
tells us very little. For one thing, such a profile probably
fits several million middle-aged American males—most of
whom have not tried to kill other people. (Recall how many
people rush to apply the unhelpful descriptive cliché of
“loner” to assassins and those who carry out mass shootings.)