Personality Theory for the Twenty-First Century 151political-social-economic events (issues) will tend to display
conservative behavior in the books and magazines that are
read, the television programs that are watched, the lectures
that are attended, the church that is attended, the voting
choices that are made, the person who is married, the opin-
ions that are expressed, and so on. As this example shows, a
general trait—emotional-motivational, language-cognitive,
or sensorimotor—promulgates additional trait develop-
ment by ensuring additional experience of the same type that
originally produced the BBR. In the abnormal area, for ex-
ample, once the individual has learned negative emotional re-
sponses to people generally, the individual will display
negative behaviors (such as suspicion) to people. They in
turn will typically respond in negative ways that will further
condition the individual to have negative emotional re-
sponses to people. That can become a general, deep, and con-
tinuing abnormal trait.
Stability in personality is produced in these ways. Thus,
the BBRs, once formed, tend to ensure continuity of experi-
ence, learning, and behavior. But personality can also exhibit
change. For the process of personality development never
ends. Learning goes on for the whole life span. In unusual
cases something may happen to change a fundamental direc-
tion in life. To illustrate, a conservative, conventional man
may experience the horrors and immorality of war and
thereby read things and participate in activities and meet peo-
ple he otherwise would not. And these continuing experi-
ences may ultimately provide him with new BBRs—new
personality traits—that change his behavior drastically. The
cumulative-hierarchical learning involved smacks of a chaos
theory effect.
The Multilevel Nature of the Theory
and the Implications
Simplification is a goal of science, and oversimplification is
common. The traditional approach to personality involves
this; that is, personality is conceptually simpler than myriad
behaviors. Specification of personality, thus, could make it
unnecessary to study all those behaviors. Furthermore, if one
takes personality to be the cause of behavior, one need only
study personality and not all the other fields of psychology,
like animal learning principles and cognitive things (such as
language), child development, social interaction principles,
educational psychology, and so on.
But PB differs here. Explaining human behavior is not
considered a two-level task, with one basic theory level, the
study of personality, which explains the second level, behav-
ior. Psychological behaviorism says that psychology is di-
vided into fields that have a general hierarchical relationship
with one another. The field of animal learning is basic to a
field like developmental psychology because much of devel-
opment depends on learning. The field of developmental psy-
chology, on the other hand, is basic to the field of personality
because important aspects of personality develop in child-
hood. In turn, knowledge of personality is relevant to psy-
chological measurement, abnormal psychology, and clinical
and educational psychology.
This multilevel relationship has many exceptions, and there
is a bidirectional exchange between areas (levels). But the pres-
ent position is that a personality theory that does not take into
account the various major fields (levels) of psychology can
only be a part theory. Learning, for example, is important to
personality, as most personologists would agree. That being
the case, the field should demand that a personality theory in-
dicate how it links to and draws from the study of learning. The
same is true of the fields of child development, experimental
psychology (in studying language-cognition, emotion-motiva-
tion, and sensorimotor behavior), biology, and social interac-
tion. Personality theory on the other side should be basic to
personality measurement and to abnormal, clinical, educa-
tional, and industrial psychology. Personality theories should
be evaluated comparatively for the extent to which they have a
program for drawing from and contributing to the various
fields of psychological knowledge (see Staats, 1996, for PB’s
most advanced statement of its multilevel approach.)
The traditional oversimplified view of the study of per-
sonality needs change that broadens and deepens its scope as
well as its analytic powers.PERSONALITY THEORY FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYThe PB theory of personality says the phenomena of
personality—what it is, how it is learned, and the effects it
has—are complex and require a theory capable of dealing
with that complexity. And that complex theory suggests many
more things to do than the traditional approach envisages. For
one thing, there is a large task of specifying what the person-
ality repertoires are, how they are learned, and how they op-
erate. Psychological behaviorism says it has begun the study,
but the task is huge, and the program for the twenty-first cen-
tury must be suitably huge. It should be added that PB, while
showing the task to be more complex than traditionally con-
sidered, provides a foundation that simplifies the task. For all
the studies made within its framework will be related and
meaningful to one another. They all add together and advance
toward explaining personality. Doing that permits research
becoming progressively more profound, unimpeded by the