The Fault is Not in Ourselves, but in Our Methods: Comment on Schwarz

Abstract

Schwarz is right to question the methodological foundations of much of contemporary personality research. I argue that he does not go far enough, opting instead to salvage the psychometric tradition for research it cannot possibly accomplish, namely the understanding of persons in an evolutionary and historical context. Furthermore he does not address the question of measurement that has bedeviled the discipline. For all its historical tenacity, the psychometric tradition has been good at classification but weak at understanding, explanation, or description of the phenomena that most interest psychologists. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.