Brent Roberts

Who they are

The work of Brent Roberts reaches this site through the papers listed below. On this site the name is tied to Mean-Level Change, Volitional Personality Change, The Five-Factor Model, The Self-Report Problem, The Replication Crisis.

Key papers

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25. What it reports: A meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples. Social dominance, conscientiousness and emotional stability increased, most between roughly 20 and 40; social vitality and openness rose in adolescence and declined in old age; agreeableness changed only in old age.

Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345. What it reports: Compared personality traits, socioeconomic status and cognitive ability as predictors of life outcomes in prospective longitudinal studies and found the effects of personality comparable to those of the other two.

Key ideas

Mean-Level Change: The average shift in a trait across age groups, a statement about populations and not about any one person.

Volitional Personality Change: The finding that people who want to change a trait, and then actually do the things that trait involves, do shift it.

The Five-Factor Model: The mainstream structural model of personality, which describes people on five continuous dimensions rather than sorting them into kinds: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The Self-Report Problem: What happens when the only instrument available for measuring a faculty is that same faculty.

The Replication Crisis: The discovery, gathering force through the 2010s, that a large share of published psychology, and plenty of work in medicine and economics too, doesn't survive being run again with bigger samples and a pre-registered analysis plan.

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