Ten Steps Toward a Better Personality Science – A Rejoinder to the Comments

Authors

  • Daniel Leising Orcid
    Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
  • Isabel Thielmann Orcid
    Department of Psychology, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany
  • Andreas Glöckner Orcid
    Department of Psychology, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany
  • Anne Gärtner Orcid
    Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany
  • Felix Schönbrodt Orcid
    Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

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.