The session will focus on a recent chapter in which Emorie and her co-authors propose understanding personality as a person-specific, complex, nonlinear dynamic system: a multilevel organization of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and biological, situational, and cultural forces that evolves through reciprocal interactions. From this perspective, personality traits are conceptualized as emergent summaries of person-specific dynamics rather than as primary causal units. The chapter develops this argument through historical, epistemological, formal, and empirical analyses and outlines a bottom-up roadmap for an integrative personality science that takes the individual person as its primary unit of analysis.
Rather than having Emorie give a traditional talk, we would like to organize the session as a reading-group discussion. Emorie and some of her co-authors will join us to discuss the chapter and respond to questions that arise.
We therefore ask everyone who would like to attend to read the chapter carefully beforehand and, ideally, prepare a few questions or points for discussion.
Chapter: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emoriebeck/home/master/static/files/Beck-2026-aesp.pdf
You are also welcome to watch the talk Emorie gave at ECP22 as a brief introduction to the topic (you can download the video via the linked Dropbox folder). However, as the session will center on an in-depth discussion of the chapter, we strongly encourage you to read the chapter itself beforehand.
Everyone is warmly invited. We hope this format will allow for an open and stimulating exchange and very much look forward to discussing the chapter with you and its authors.