Separating the why from the what: Reply to Jonas and Markon (2015)

Abstract

In this response to the commentary offered by Jonas and Markon (2015) on our earlier work, we address points of agreement and disagreement on the nature and utility of functionalist and descriptivist accounts of personality. Specifically, we argue that explanatory and conceptual parsimony is more appropriate than statistical parsimony for evaluating the proposed models, discuss ways in which functionalist and descriptivist approaches can complement one another, and provide some cautions about interpreting latent traits.