Jack Block, the Big Five, and Personality From the Standpoints of Actor, Agent, and Author

Jack Block died before his target article could be published. Submitted to Psychological Inquiry by his son while Jack was in the hospital, the paper shows many of the earmarks of Jack Block’s long and brilliant career as a personality psychologist. Passionate, contrarian, and doggedly analytical, the paper’s traits reflect the man’s. Jack Block wanted to construct a scientifically rigorous psychology of personality that fully captures the complexity and coherence of human lives as they develop over time. To do so was his lifelong professional goal, his most-valued professional project. Over the past six decades, Jack’s story—as he lived it and wrote it—reflected the story of personality psychology itself. In the 1950s and 60s, he made game-changing contributions to the field’s debate over the validity of psychological testing and the challenge of response sets (J. Block, 1961, 1965). In the 1970s and 80s, he stood tall against the situationist attack (J. Block, 1977, 1981) while offering his own comprehensive theory of personality continuity and change (J. Block, 1971; J. H. Block & Block, 1980). In recent years, he continued to produce influential empirical papers (J. Block & Block, 2006; Shedler & Block, 1990) and to offer searing critiques of popular trends (J. Block, 1989, 1995, 2001.) His was a narrative of the bellicose rebel with a cause, the iconoclast who fought the status quo every step of the way. Analyzing the last musical works of classical composers, Simonton (1989) has shown that swan songs tend to be somewhat less complex and original than a composer’s earlier compositions but also more emotionally moving, and more popular in the long run. According to Simonton, a composer’s last piece often proves to be an elegant reprise of his or her musical genius. As far as we know, researchers have not examined the swan songs of psychological scientists. In the case of Jack Block’s last composition, however, this journal’s target article seems to run contrary to Simonton’s trend. Restless and edgy, the article offers a collection of “perambulating and idiosyncratic” “ruminations” regarding the role of the five-factor model of personality in psychological science. The paper feels like a work in progress, uneven and incomplete, with flashes of new insight punctuating more quotidian passages where Block recycles old and complicated arguments he has made before. There is nothing elegant or simple about it. It may be that Jack Block did not have time to iron out the paper’s rough edges before his life was cut off. But more likely, Jack’s swan song, like so many of the influential articles he wrote in his career, was always going to be a gritty and restless communiqué from the battlefield. Jack Block was a fighter. He fought against the accepted truths and the conventional fashions of the discipline. Over the past 15 years, he fought against the Big Five. In what follows, we first briefly comment on the main criticisms Block levied against the Big Five in the target article. Whereas we are sympathetic to his contrarian approach, we suggest that he overlooked significant achievements of the five-factor approach to personality while occasionally holding the model to impossibly stringent standards. Second, we suggest that, in some ways, Jack Block did not go far enough in his critique. Our basic thesis is that the Big Five does what it does quite well: It provides an adequate and comprehensive perspective on personality from the standpoint of the social actor. What it does not do, however, and apparently was never intended to do, is to provide a way of understanding personality from the equally important standpoints of the motivated agent and the autobiographical author (McAdams & Olson, 2010). Taking on Jack’s contrarian spirit, we suggest that the contemporary field of personality psychology as a whole is constricted and short-sighted in the same way that the Big Five is. The Big Five does a reasonably good job of addressing what most personality psychologists see to be the main concerns of the discipline. The big problem is that most personality psychologists set their sights too low.