Editorial: The Puzzle of Personality Types

The empirical study of personality differences is sometimes like a rough ride through a desert without orientation (lacking constructs, established methods, and replicable empirical findings), sometimes like an expedition into a jungle (facing an inextricable net of many similar but non-identical constructs, diverse established methods, and contradictory findings), and sometimes like a puzzle (trying to put together apparently incoherent pieces based on established constructs and methods). The current quest for personality types is of the last kind. This Special Issue builds upon the First Expert Workshop on Personality Psychology: Personality Structure and Development Across the Life-Span, 29 October–1 November 2000, at Ghent, Belgium, directed by Ivan Mervielde and Paul T. Costa Jr. This workshop was the first of a series of workshops sponsored by the European Association for Personality Psychology. As it turned out, the utility and proper operationalization of personality types became a hotly debated issue, and there was a general recognition that the puzzle of personality types was far from being solved. Therefore, when I was asked to edit a Special Issue for the European Journal of Personality, I happily took the opportunity to devote this Special Issue to the puzzle of personality types. And I was particularly happy that both Avshalom Caspi and Wim Hofstee, who had already participated in the Expert Workshop, agreed to coedit the Special Issue. They not only reviewed all contributions but also provided valuable comments about the organization of the Special Issue in general. In addition, Wim Hofstee contributed a trenchant critique of broadly shared but questionable assumptions underlying current personality assessment methodology. Personality can be defined as the intraindividual organization of experience and behaviour. Thus, personality types refer to people with similar intraindividual organizations of their experience and behaviour. However, empirical research over the last 50 years has treated personality nearly exclusively from a variable-centred perspective that culminated (or dead-ended, as critics such as J. Block, 1995, put it) in the Five-Factor Model of personality description. Throughout the history of personality psychology, it has been pointed out that such a variable-centred approach may miss an important aspect of personality, the configuration of traits within an individual (Stern, 1911; Allport, 1937; Block, 1971; Magnusson, 1988; Mervielde & Asendorpf, 2000). For a long time, J. H. Block and J. Block (1980) swam