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Reliability as a Value in Personality Research

A Rejoinder to McCrae

Central Methodist College, MO, SQUACKEN{at}CMC2.CMC.EDU

McCrae seems to believe that the empirical status of the stability thesis is guaranteed by virtue of the fact that scores on measures of personality traits are always free to change over time. Yet, my thesis that trait stability is a noncontingent truth is not predicated on specific claims regarding phenotypic manifestations of personality traits. Rather, I maintain that McCrae and Costa's pre-empirical assumptions logically require an interpretation of the human personality in terms of stable traits. In this rejoinder, I further clarify this `strong' claim and I defend my `weaker' claim that the transcontextual nature of traits loads the dice in favor of empirical demonstrations of long-term stability.

Key Words: adult development • epistemology • personality traits • reliability

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