Why has personality psychology played an outsized role in the credibility revolution?

Why we wrote it

Personality psychology is a small subfield with a reputation for being unglamorous. Yet personality researchers have been visible advocates for replication, data sharing, and other reforms, and some of the field’s practices have become models for other areas of psychology. We wondered why. We do not know the answer, so we wrote down our experiences and guesses for anyone who wants to think about it, including future historians of the field.

What we argue

This is an opinion piece, and we say so. Any claim without a citation should be read as speculation.

We suspect three things helped. First, history. The person-situation debate of the 1970s and 1980s questioned whether personality traits exist at all, and the subfield had to defend itself with evidence. That may have made the replication crisis feel familiar. Second, norms. The field has little status or money to protect, so criticism was less likely to feel like a personal attack, and researchers have long disagreed with each other in the open. Third, methods. We have a long habit of checking measurement validity, collecting large samples, and doing descriptive work. Studying all five Big Five traits at once also makes null results easier to publish, because a paper can report the four traits that did not relate to an outcome alongside the one that did.

Where the field falls short

We also list what we do poorly. We lean heavily on self-report, we sometimes struggle to interpret small effects, and we often want causal answers from observational designs, since we cannot randomly assign anyone a personality. Both the researchers and the participants in our field come from a narrow slice of the world, which limits what we can say about people in general.

What it means

Rigor may make a field a little less exciting. We think that trade is worth making. We might be wrong about all of this, and we would like to hear alternative explanations.