efforts to launch themselves into adult roles. Career psychologists
have accordingly put much effort into developing inventories to
assess people’s interests, aspirations, self-efficacy, and other ends-
specific traits but have paid relatively little attention to the more
general traits of ability and personality, despite the many instru-
ments already available for measuring them.
4.Ends-specific traits as bridges between general traits and social
niches. The different ends-specific traits emerge when people pur-
sue personal ends (amusement, status, well-being) along established
cultural pathways (sports, employment as accountant or auto
mechanic). Ends-specific trait compounds are thus the bridges link-
ing highly general traits with particular social niches—the bridges
across which genes and culture do commerce within us and thereby
orient our behavior to life within a particular culture. Because we
are inherently social beings, personal development involves our
entering into society and society into us across these bridges (for
example, by our taking on social roles that shape our activities,
skills, and self-perceptions while simultaneously integrating us into
the culture).
To clarify, the culture does not create the most basic differences
among us (personality, physique, intelligence), but it both constrains
and facilitates their expression. It does so by packaging these largely
independent general differences into useful trait sets or profiles—
distinct cultural toolkits, so to speak. Multivariate behavioral genetic
analyses might, for instance, reveal Holland’s typology of vocational
interests to be one such collection of trait compounds in the post-
industrial West. For example, Social interests might have genetic
roots in both verbal facility and agreeableness, among other traits,
and Investigative interests might have genetic roots in openness
to experience, moderately high general intelligence, and perhaps
spatial ability. Ends-specific trait compounds may also be more sus-
ceptible than are general traits to shared family influences. Whereas
no general trait has been found to be permanently affected by shared
environmental influences, some of the ends-specific traits have
been. For instance, roughly 10 percent of differences in all the
GOTTFREDSON’S THEORY OF CIRCUMSCRIPTION, COMPROMISE, AND SELF-CREATION 121