Ten steps toward a better personality science – a rejoinder to the comments

Abstract

We respond to the comments (https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.9227) on our “Ten Steps” paper (https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6029), focusing on the most prominent themes: (1) What motivates scientists?, (2) Consensus-building (Is our field ready? May there be adverse side-effects? How shall we do it?), (3) How may institutional change be facilitated?, (4) Diversity (of participants, stimuli, methodology, measures, and among researchers), (5) The reliability of our proposed scoring system, and (6) The real-world relevance of personality research. We stand by our call for more concerted consensus-building and offer a few clarifications in this regard. We also issue four specific calls to action to our colleagues in the field: (a) specify legitimate paths to greater consensus, (b) explicate what constitutes good “qualitative” research, (c) help establish a widely used, public domain item database, and (d) determine what the most important contemporary goals of personality research are.This rejoinder reflects our perspective on some of the major themes that emerged in the course of the lively debate over our target article. We think this debate has showcased numerous urgent needs for improvement in our field. The rich, complex, detailed, and sometimes heated discussions that ensued have been very illuminating and constructive, in our view. The pre-liminary outcome is a relatively clear and comprehensive vision of how personality research might be improved. We encourage all of our colleagues to help move the field in the direction of greater credibility and efficiency together. We offer four specific suggestions for issues that we think are important to tackle, but these are by no means exhaustive. All of this will be very hard work, but it needs to be done, and the rewards may in fact be lasting and very substantial. What an exciting time this is to be a (personality) psychologist! Consensus-building will be vital for moving our field forward Legitimate paths toward consensus will have to be specified Relevant issues: Roadmap, inclusiveness, distribution of power, transparency We partly revised our reward scheme and keep developing it