The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology, Fourth Edition

Experience the story of a lifetime


When you want to truly get to know a person, dates and facts about their life will only tell you so much. You need to look at the stories that define that person's life, as well as their individual traits and characteristics, as defined by human nature and culture.


When it comes to studying personality, the larger story matters most of all. In The Person: An Integrated Introduction to Personality Psychology, Fourth Edition, Dan McAdams presents a bold and integrative vision for personality psychology that puts many different ideas into a meaningful structure. With this text, you can understand the larger story, and discover how powerful and useful studying personality psychology is today.


The text begins with fundamental evolutionary, social, and cultural contexts for understanding personality, followed by an examination of the three different levels of an individual's personality:

- Dispositional traits, a person's general tendencies.

- Characteristic adaptations, a person's desires, beliefs, concerns, and coping mechanisms.

- Life stories, the stories that give a life a sense of unity, meaning, and purpose.


Key Features:
* New streamlined paperback format.
* Updated with recent research findings to engage professors and students alike.
* Presents a clear unifying vision for the field of personality psychology.
* Brings together the best from traditional personality theories and contemporary research.
* Addresses the most important questions that people can ask about their own lives and about human life in general.

Experience the story of a lifetime

When you want to truly get to know a person, dates and facts about their life will only tell you so much. You need to look at the stories that define that person’s life, as well as their individual traits and characteristics, as defined by human nature and culture.

When it comes to studying personality, the larger story matters most of all. In The Person: An Integrated Introduction to Personality Psychology, Fourth Edition, Dan McAdams presents a bold and integrative vision for personality psychology that puts many different ideas into a meaningful structure. With this text, you can understand the larger story, and discover how powerful and useful studying personality psychology is today.

The text begins with fundamental evolutionary, social, and cultural contexts for understanding personality, followed by an examination of the three different levels of an individual’s personality:

- Dispositional traits, a person’s general tendencies.

- Characteristic adaptations, a person’s desires, beliefs, concerns, and coping mechanisms.

- Life stories, the stories that give a life a sense of unity, meaning, and purpose.

Key Features:

• New streamlined paperback format.
• Updated with recent research findings to engage professors and students alike.
• Presents a clear unifying vision for the field of personality psychology.
• Brings together the best from traditional personality theories and contemporary research.
• Addresses the most important questions that people can ask about their own lives and about human life in general.