Toward a unified science of personality coherence

Gordon W. Allport (1937) considered the coherence of personality to be a matter of degree and, as such, an individual difference. Although considered by some to be the “central, unique charge” of personality psychology (Cervone & Shoda, 1999, p. 3), the study of personality coherence has been dispersed across different theoretical communities. We review how personality coherence has been defined and measured within the following five contemporary theoretical communities: the multivariate community (who focus upon the individual’s profile of global trait dispositions), the social-cognitive community (who focus upon the individual’s contextualized self-structures), the personological community (who focus upon the individual’s unique and ongoing life story), the cybernetic community (who focus upon the individual’s goal hierarchy), and the organismic community (who focus upon the individual’s sense of self). We conclude by reflecting upon the extent to which the five perspectives converge upon an underlying self-epistemic function.