Dan P. McAdams

Dan P. McAdams is an American psychologist and the Henry Wade Rogers Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University.

Biography

He was raised in Gary, Indiana, where he attended nearby Valparaiso University. In 1979 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the Harvard Department of Social Relations.
McAdams is the author of The Person: An Introduction to the Science of Personality Psychology, a classroom textbook. He co-edited, with Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson, the eleven-book series "The Narrative Study of Lives". He is a member of The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

McAdams' three level model of personality was used in Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis The three levels are :

Dispositional traits, a person's general tendencies. For example, the Big Five personality traits lists: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.
Characteristic adaptations, a person's desires, beliefs, concerns, and coping mechanisms.
Life stories, the stories that give a life a sense of unity, meaning, and purpose. This is known as narrative identity.

McAdams, D. P., & Guo, J. . Narrating the generative life. Psychological Science, 26, 475–483.
Manczak, E., Zapata-Gietl, C., & McAdams, D. P. . Regulatory focus in the life story: Prevention and promotion as expressed in three layers of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, 169–181.
McAdams, D. P. . The psychological self as actor, agent, and author. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 272–295.
McAdams, D.P.. What do we know when we know a person? Journal of Personality. 63:3, 365 - 396. Duke University Press.
McAdams, D. P.. Personality, Modernity, and the storied self: A contemporary framework for studying persons. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 295–321.