The Definition of Personality, the Domain of Personality Psychology and Major Investigation Trends

Personality is strictly connected to the notion of person and is commonly associated with patterns of habits and mental properties that impress others and make individuals distinguishable from one another. While the person can be viewed as the ideal type that summarizes the unique proprieties and entitlements of humans among living beings as regards self-consciousness, intentionality and responsibility, personality can be regarded as the system that summarizes the qualities of being particular persons. Indeed, personality attests to what a person can be under given conditions of life. This leads us to acknowledge that each person has their own personality that accounts for their personal and social identity, namely for the experience of being I and me, and for the recognition of ‘mineness’ that we share with others. Likewise, it leads to the realization that the properties and diverse expressions of personality are bounded to the historical, social and cultural context in which individuals are recognized as persons entitled to rights and obligations, and as agents that make things happen and are responsible for the consequences of their actions. In this regard, the same notions of person and personality in current psychology carry the legacy of Western speculation and, in particular, of Christian philosophy, concerning the uniqueness of human nature and the distinctive properties of the human mind. As a result, the fact that most modern scientific literature has largely been dominated by Western paradigms and by the English language warns of its limitations in contexts where different world views and lexicons may have posited alternative frames within which to address the various aspects of human experience and of individuality.

Under these premises and caveats, and in accordance with a large part of current scientific literature, personality can be defined as the system, made up of cognitive, affective and behavioural structures and processes, from whose orchestration derives the sense of unity, stability and continuity that characterizes individuals’ personal identity. This leads us to view personality as the psychological system that results from the evolutionary co-action of nature and culture, to enable humans to adapt actively to the environment, to interact constructively with each other, and to make sense of their experience. Hence, this means attributing a special role to the study of personality psychology in bringing to unity the various disciplines of psychology, to accompany the study of individuals with the study of societies and of cultures, and, ultimately, to meet what people expect from science as regards the conditions that may bring about the best of their humanity. This is particularly needed at a time when science has extended human power to a scale that may be worrying with regard to the prospects of life on our planet unless proper knowledge of the determinants of human decisions and behaviours is gained.

While every individual needs to be an innocent personality psychologist in order to dialogue with themselves and to recognize others, science is still far from meeting all the demands that may arise regarding the organization of thoughts, feeling and actions that characterize being human and that enable living together. These demands concern the mental structures and mechanisms accounting for the affective, cognitive and motivational processes that can explain people’s behaviour and account for the extent to which individuals can be held responsible for their lives.

In this regard, the study of personality has traditionally developed along two courses of inquiry: the study of individuals’ behavioural features that mostly impact on others and on society as a whole, and the study of mental processes that account for people’s unique experience (Caprara and Cervone Reference Caprara and Cervone2000). As people exhibit consistent stable patterns of experience and action, some personality psychologists have focused on individual differences, mostly with regard to habits and beliefs, that enable us to distinguish individuals from one another, and to make conjectures and predictions regarding their conduct. This has led to considering personality as an architecture of dispositions that are traceable to a few basic psychophysical entities that, from the very beginning, have imprinted the kind of personality that may develop. Other personality psychologists, instead, have focused on the mental processes that emerge and unfold during development, and thus on the organization of mental structures that accord thought and action, and from which each individual’s unity, coherence and continuity derive. This has led to considering personality as a system that interacts actively with the environment in conformity with personal criteria and goals.

The two views are not independent of one another, and both are crucial for prediction and explanation in everyday transactions. Yet, prioritizing one view over the other has led to diverse questions, different methods and thus to distinct research programmes. Although the real story is always made of multiple combinations of theories and practices that unavoidably hybridize one another, trait and social cognitive theories can be viewed as the ones that best summarize the different approaches which have dominated the field of personality psychology in the last decades, at least in academia.

Social Cognitive Theories

Social cognitive theories include several approaches that, to varying degrees, have addressed personality mostly as a cognitive system that operates in a social context. Broadly speaking, cognition may also include affect and motivation, while the social sphere may include the whole variety of phenomena pertaining to interpersonal relations, being part of communities and culture. A common feature of various approaches is the assumption that in order to understand what individuals do and what they may become, one should understand how people appraise the world and make sense of their experience. The premise is that people grow and live in a social and cultural context that provides the opportunities and constraints for their development, and gives meaning to their behaviour. Thus, social cognitive theorists have addressed the manifold cognitive and affective structures and processes which account for how people appraise, explain and direct their conduct (Bandura Reference Bandura1986, Reference Bandura2006; Mischel and Shoda Reference Mischel and Shoda1995). This leads to a focus on how events and situations are encoded, how emotions are activated and managed, and how people develop beliefs, competencies, expectancies that lead to setting goals, generating plans and executing behaviours that accord with the image they have and want to convey to others of themselves.

The use of individual differences has been instrumental in addressing the process that accounts for how people acquire and organize their knowledge of themselves and of the world, how they manage their affectivity, relate to each other, reflect upon their experiences, dialogue with themselves, experience needs and motives, endorse value priorities, and accord their conduct to the pursuit of meaningful goals. The notions of needs and motives have been used to organize stable individual differences in being sensitive to particular incentives, and thus to account for individuals’ desires and goals (McClelland Reference McClelland1985). Over the years, a large consensus has been reached in pointing to autonomy, relatedness and competence as the basic psychological needs whose satisfaction conditions individuals’ development and full realization (Ryan and Decy Reference Ryan and Decy2017).

Likewise, the notion of value has served to refer to stable individual differences in the sphere of priorities and aspirations that are largely grounded in the experiences people share with others and that are functional to ones’ own self-realization and to living together. In this regard, Shalom Shwartz’s taxonomy of values (Schwartz Reference Schwartz and Zanna1992) has largely been corroborated across cultures as a consensual model to address the basic principles that guide individuals’ conduct in society. It posits 10 basic values distributed around a circumplex in which self-focused values such as power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation and self-direction oppose socially focused values such as universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity and security. Ultimately social cognitive approaches redirected their focus from traits and situations to the personality properties that enable individuals to make sense of their experience and to interact purposively with the environment as active agents that construe, select and change the environments in which they live.

This has led to highlighting the reciprocity of person–situation interactions as they unfold over time, and to paying special attention to the conditions that allow turning human potentials into agentic capacities such as self-reflection, symbolization, learning, forethought, and behaviour regulation. These capacities enable individuals to exert a broad control over their experiences and to extend their influence upon the external world. They, however, do not spring spontaneously nor operate independently of the environments, both physical and social, that provide the opportunities, establish the limits and shape their expressions.

Special attention has been paid to the cognitive and affective processes and structures that emerge and develop over time to enable individuals to make sense of their experience, to strive for goals and to chart the course of their lives. Individuals, in fact, assign meanings to the circumstances they encounter, monitor their feelings, dialogue with themselves, and regulate their actions and efforts in accordance with the pursuits they value.

Among the cognitive structures that attest to mental processes capable of conferring unity, continuity and directness to individuals’ actions, and that attest to the power of human agency, none has proved to exert a more pervasive influence over thought, motivation and action than people’s perceived self-efficacy, namely beliefs people hold about their capacity to cope effectively with life’s challenges and to face demanding situations. These concern beliefs in one’s own capability to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given achievements, as well as beliefs in one’s own capability to manage one’s own feelings and thoughts to maximize one’s own achievements and well-being. Originally, self-efficacy beliefs have been viewed as knowledge structures deriving from practice and from reflection upon experience under given conditions (Bandura Reference Bandura1977, Reference Bandura1986). Claiming their specificity and pursuing a multifaceted approach in the study of their various expressions across tasks, situations and subjective states have been critical to identifying and addressing the self-regulatory processes and mechanisms from which their properties derive, and to devise practices that, through guided and assisted mastery experiences, are conducive to inoculating self-confidence and to valuing one’s own capacities. This has proved valid in various contexts: to sustain learning in schools, to improve performance in sport and at work, and to protect and promote health (Bandura Reference Bandura1997).

Yet self-efficacy beliefs do not operate in isolation from one another since people develop interrelated beliefs about capabilities pertaining to broad domains of functioning. As people reflect upon their experiences across various settings, self-efficacy beliefs may generalize beyond specific performances and situations, and across activities, due to co-development of subskills and to beliefs resulting from mastery experiences. Thus, discovering the kinds of self-efficacy beliefs that exert a major influence in given domains of functioning, generalize more widely and are more accessible to change, is crucial to account for the unique organization of personality and to design interventions aimed at promoting individual growth, health and well-being.

This has led to extending the study of perceived self-efficacy to broad domains of functioning, such as emotion regulation and interpersonal relations, in accordance with a conceptual model in which self-efficacy beliefs in managing emotions and interpersonal relations significantly contribute to well-being and successful adjustment across situations (Caprara Reference Caprara, von Hofsten and Backman2002). Several findings have attested to the merit of this model as regards the study of psychological disorders and of well-being, showing that the more people feel able to deal efficaciously with their affectivity, the more they feel (and, indeed, are) capable of handling their relations with others successfully, and the more they perform successfully and feel good (Bandura et al. Reference Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Gerbino and Pastorelli2003; Steca et al. Reference Steca, Caprara, Tramontano, Vecchio and Roth2009).

Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Personality Development and Functioning

Although trait and social cognitive theories have often been portrayed as rival theories, their convergence has been inevitable in acknowledging the need for a theory that can integrate description and prediction in order to account for stability and for change and, ultimately, to meet the requirements of assessment, care and promotion of the individual’s assets and well-being (Baumert et al. Reference Baumert, Schmitt, Perugini, Johnson, Blum, Borkenau, Costantini, Jaap, Denissen, Fleeson, Grafton, Jayawikreme, Kurzius, Macleod, Miller, Read, Roberts, Robinson, Wood and Wirzus2017; McAdams and Olson Reference McAdams and Olson2010; Mischel and Shoda Reference Mischel and Shoda1998; Roberts and Yoon Reference Roberts and Yoon2022). Today, most scholars would agree to view personality as a dynamic system of psychological structures and processes that mediates the relation of the individual with the environment and accounts for what a person is and may become. This occurs under the assumptions that one may derive from previous research in psychology and from findings of other biological and social sciences.

It is evident that the overall organization of this complex system results from synergistic interactions among multiple cognitive, affective and behavioural subsystems that convey, foster and preserve a sense of personal identity. Likewise, it is evident that to account for constellations of qualities that allow us to distinguish individuals from one another and for the sense of unity, continuity, wholeness and uniqueness that distinguishes each individual’s experience, one should focus both on the orchestration of affect, cognition and behaviour that unfolds over the entire course of life and on the transactions that take place between the person and the environment within given social cultural contexts. This leads us to examine the vast array of assets that equip human beings to deal with the fundamental task of human existence and to identify the conditions of life that foster the establishment of mental structures enabling the actualization of those potentials. While development and functioning of individual personalities and of social systems are reciprocally conditioned, human beings carry the responsibility of creating the conditions of life that may maximize their welfare.

Advances of knowledge on the functioning of brain, genetics and development have led us to further appreciate the vast potential of genetic endowments, the plasticity of brain functioning, the malleability of conduct and the variety of developmental pathways conducive to well-being, successful adaptation, and deviant behaviours or suffering. They have also led us to view the mind as an emergent property of the brain whose development and functioning, however, is largely conditioned by the opportunities of the environments in which people grow.

A large body of developmental and clinical research, on the other hand, has documented the important role that social environments exert in laying the foundations and in conditioning the realization of personality. They point to the role of earlier experiences in sustaining maturation, in shaping dispositions and in promoting the development of abilities that are needed for social adaptation. Equally, they point to the importance of nurturing, throughout life, the capacities and attitudes necessary for successfully managing challenging transitions and ageing.

Ultimately, it has become clear that one should consider the person as a whole and over the whole life span, as established by the seminal intuitions of David Magnusson. Indeed, Magnusson was a precursor in advocating the need to complement the traditional variable approach with a novel person approach. While the former has commonly pointed to specific features of psychological functioning and examined their individual variations across time and context, the latter aims to address the undivided living being over the course of development. It also focuses on how adaptive processes of maturation and learning unfold over time, carrying continuous reorganizations of mental, biological and behavioural factors into new patterns of functioning (Magnusson Reference Magnusson2001, Reference Magnusson2003).

It is likely that humans come into the world with a set of predispositions that have been selected through phylogenesis and which, over the course of development, equip them with the mental structures enabling them to deal with the basic tasks of human existence, such as interacting with the environment, collaborating with similar others, and preserving their life. Over the course of development, emergency and appropriation characterize the joint action that nature and culture exerts, through maturation and socialization, to construe a dynamic personality system capable of interacting adaptively with the environment. To this aim, the establishment of stable coherent and functional patterns of responses across settings do not reflect inherited scripts but result from the unique potentials of human beings to capitalize upon experience and to manifest themselves in forms that are most congenial to adaptation and growth.

Predispositions turn into mental structures and adaptive behavioural tendencies in accordance with the requirements and the resources of the living environments. Likewise, people gain access to their own inner states, make sense of their own and others’ behaviour, and purposively set the goals of their lives, gradually and in accordance with the opportunities and expectations of their social environments, drawing upon self-reflection and upon their own experience, while using the lexicon and knowledge made available by their culture. Thus, in looking at the transactions that occur over the entire life span between personality and the social environments, one should focus on the transformations that result from their reciprocal influences either as regards the structures and process that account for the various expressions of personality and also with regard to the social outcomes that attest to its impact on the world.

The study of intelligence, as the orchestration of those cognitive abilities enabling humans to solve problems, cannot be disjoined from the whole personality development and functioning, since the active role that persons may play over the course of their lives largely depends upon their mental abilities to reason, to learn and to solve problems taking advantage of experience and forethought. Likewise, investigating how traits operate in concert with motives, values and self-efficacy beliefs is crucial, both to understand the power that human beings may exert over the environments, and also to promote the mindsets that are conducive to value and pursue the common good.

These phenomena have often been treated as different entities and within traditions of research that have emphasized their distinctiveness and overlooked their commonalities. This mostly accorded with the needs of scientists to organize knowledge of psychological structures that one infers from individuals’ variation in phenomena one can observe or report. Yet, it is unlikely that they correspond to specific entities, established from the very beginning as part of our genetic endowment and located in specific biological loci. Rather, it is likely that they correspond to different organizations of mental structures and processes that emerge over the course of development through the interactions of the entire human organism with the environment.

Indeed, cognitive abilities, traits, motives, values and self-efficacy beliefs may engage the same biological systems and, to various degrees, may contribute to revealing how the environments contribute to shaping their expression and how nature and nurture impinge upon individuals’ experience and behaviour. Still, the functions that these constructs have exerted in organizing our knowledge of personality account for their commonalities and diversities more than the knowledge of their causes (Wood et al. Reference Wood, Gardner and Harms2015). Their relevance is mostly due to the fact that they have allowed us to distinguish individuals from one another, have been associated with socially relevant outcomes and have proved useful to account for people’s strivings, achievements and well-being.

The notion of trait may still serve to refer to stable individual characteristics that reflect basic potentials and manifest themselves in the form of habitual behaviours and evaluative dispositions. Indeed, a large body of evidence has shown that individual differences in behavioural dispositions commonly traced to the Big Five can be traced to two higher-order factors (De Young Reference De Young2006; Digman Reference Digman1997), which likely equip humans to deal with the fundamental tasks of their existence. In accordance with earlier intuitions of Bakan (Reference Bakan1966), they can be referred to as agency and communion. Furthermore it has been found that individual differences in self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction are stable and exert a notable influence on health, well-adjustment, performance and well-being, no less than the Big Five. Actually it turned out that self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction are evaluative dispositions, associated to a variety of positive outcomes, highly intercorrelated and traceable to a common latent dimension across several languages and cultural contexts (Caprara et al. Reference Caprara, Alessandri, Tormsdorff, Heikamp, Yamaguchi and Suzuki2012). This led to positing a disposition, originally called positive orientation, that accounts for a basic trait that leads to appraising and organizing one’s own personal experience under a positive lens. Subsequent studies have corroborated our reasoning regarding the need and the protective function of positive orientation, while pointing to Positivity as the evaluative tendency that, over the course of and concurrently with the development of self-awareness, self-reflection and forethinking, attests to what is common to self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction, and what may result from their synergies (Caprara et al. Reference Caprara, Alessandri and Caprara2017).

Over the last few decades, studies have multiplied to investigate the relations among traits, motives and values, and their associations with a whole array of outcomes (Dweck Reference Dweck2017; Fisher and Boer Reference Fisher and Boer2015; Roccas et al. Reference Roccas, Sagiv, Schwartz and Knafo2002; Vecchione et al. Reference Vecchione, Alessandri, Roccas and Caprara2019). Findings have shown that traits, motives and values are all relatively stable and inter-correlated, and are all traceable to basic functions for adaptation and growth, such as interacting with the environment, living with others and valuing ones’ life. Furthermore, it has been shown that they are all susceptible to change over the course of life and that their expressions and changes are largely conditional on the opportunities and constraints of living conditions. In particular, basic traits such as the Big Five have turned out to be less stable than originally expected, and are variously susceptible to change, thereby showing a general tendency to develop in a positive direction until a decline takes the upper hand at an age that is much more advanced than in the past (Bleidorn et al. Reference Bleidorn, Klimstra, Denissen, Rentfrow, Potter and Gosling2013; Damian et al. Reference Damian, Spengler, Sutu and Roberts2019; Roberts and Yoon Reference Roberts and Yoon2022). A similar tendency suggesting a kind of growth in maturation and adjustment has been found for self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction (Baird et al. Reference Baird, Lucas and Donnellan2010; Orth et al. Reference Orth, Erol and Luciano2018; Tetzner et al. Reference Tetzner, Drewelies, Duezel, Demuth, Wagner, Lachman, Lindenberger, Ram and Gerstorf2024).

These changes parallel the developmental tendencies of what has been referred to as fluid and crystallized intelligence: namely, the components of intelligence that mostly reflect biological and cultural endowment (Cattell Reference Cattell1963). After young adulthood and over the course of adulthood up to an advanced age, culture and experience tend to account more for intellectual performances that principally depend on capacities to organize thought, motivation and action, to capitalize upon practice, to select ones’ own endeavour, and to compensate ones’ own limitations (Baltes et al. Reference Baltes, Staudinger and Lindenberger1999; Schaie Reference Schaie2004).

Changes with age are generally adaptive in response to social opportunities and expectations (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Wood and Smith2005). The correlation between traits, motives and values, and their stability, in fact, are congruent with social attributions and expectations, further attesting to the continuous and reciprocal interaction between humans and their social environments.

All this reinforces the conviction that one cannot understand personality unless one focuses on the functions it serves, the tasks it has to cope with, and the conditions under which it can operate. Nor can one understand personality unless one focuses upon its development, which is always historically and socially situated and conditioned. In reality, the study of biological factors, at the level of genes, body and brain, is crucial in order to identify the correlates that establish limits to the expressions of personality. But the knowledge of its dynamics and manifestations mostly derives from the study of phenotypes that attest to the emergence and functioning of psychological systems capable of interacting with social and cultural systems. This requires focusing on evaluative and behavioural dispositions, and on the regulatory properties that are most relevant for individual adaptation, in order to clarify the degree to which they reflect different mental structures accounting for different organizations of individual experiences, and the extent to which each of them, uniquely and in concert with the others, contributes to personality functioning.

The Self-system

The coordination of the manifold and diverse expressions of personality requires the functioning of an internal organization, which one may identify with the self-system that also accounts for the sense of unity, coherence and continuity that is unique to human’s experience.

The self-system is responsible for the experience of being I and me, for the ownership people hold of their thoughts, feelings, purposes and actions, for the sense of being and remaining themselves despite changing continuously in the pursuit of the full expression of their own individuality, and in accordance with the opportunities and constraints of their environments. It is the locus of subjectivity, agency and responsibility that results from the concertation of mental structures and processes that gradually take control over the various predispositions that equip humans to face the fundamental task of existence and puts them at the service of adaptation and development. It is the organizing system that integrates personal self-representations and memories into personal narratives and identities and predisposes towards action. It enables people to enact and to shape dispositions in accordance with contingent constraints and opportunities, and to transform their environments in accordance with their own goals and at the service of the actualization of their own potential. Ultimately, it is the self-system that accounts for the integration of fuzzy combinations of affect, cognition and behaviour that, conceptually and conventionally, are commonly acknowledged as separate features of personality such as cognitive abilities, traits, motives and values.

Much remains unknown about the development and the functioning of the self-system (Bandura Reference Bandura, Marsh, Craven and McInerney2008; Blasi Reference Harter2004; Harter Reference Blasi, Lightfoot, Laonde and Chandler2012; McAdams Reference McAdams2013). Its development is likely interwoven with the development of cognitive abilities and with the experience of positive and negative affect under the guidance and within the opportunities of the sociocultural conditions in which people grow. Concurrently with the development of cognitive abilities, children learn to be a distinct entity from those who take care of them. Depending on how other people’s care alleviates a child’s pain and carries pleasure, the child acknowledges that life and growth can be worthy of value.

The establishment of a unified sense of self, including I and me, and of mineness that lies at the core of individuals’ identity, and attests to all the above organizing properties, emerges gradually and concurrently with maturation processes that enable people to appropriate their own experience under the conditions made available by the environment in which they unfold. It is thus with the establishment of the subjective I that autonomy, relatedness and competence become experienced and gradually acknowledged as needs whose satisfaction pave the way to self-determination and self-actualization (Ryan and Deci Reference Ryan and Decy2017). Likewise, it is over the course of development that humans, in concomitance with the formation of their own personal identity, assimilate the values transmitted from one generation to another and for the influence that they may exert throughout individuals’ life (Blasi and Glodis Reference Blasi and Glodis1995).

Self-awareness, self-reflection, self-determination, self-regulation and self-reactivity are core properties of the self-system that account for the distinctive qualities of being human. Self-awareness and self-reflection allow people to acquire and revise their knowledge about themselves and the social world by taking advantage of positive experiences and of positive affect to nurture their confidence in themselves and in life. Self-determination accounts for the purposes people pursue; self-regulation allows aligning purposes and behaviour to goals and standards; self-reactivity allows aligning behaviour to judgement and forethought by fostering actions that may carry pleasure and pride, and by refraining from actions that, instead, may carry blame and anxiety. These properties enable human beings to contribute to charting the course of their lives as they represent the levers through which they may extend their control over themselves and, accordingly, the priority targets of psychological investigations and interventions aimed at pursuing a betterment of the human condition.

Along this reasoning, I gained the conviction that moral judgement on how people should treat each other, and moral efficacy in aligning one’s own actions to righteous principles, represent the highest expressions of personality development that most attest to human potential. Likewise, I became convinced that the future of our societies largely depends on the moral growth of citizens, and thus on human beings’ potential to constantly transcend the moral legacy of previous generations in pursuing the conditions that may grant everyone the opportunity to achieve the best of their humanity. This requires nurturing individuals’ capacity to transcend their own private interest and to operate as moral agents that pursue the common good by committing themselves to social obligations and righteous causes. Indeed, the more integrity, mutual care and justice represent moral ideals that people have appropriated as irremissible components of their selves, the more they operate as imperatives that they cannot elude without undermining their being worthy of respect.

Conclusions/Promising Directions

Our societies need to know more about how people function, develop, relate to each other, and manage diversities in a global world, and about how their mental potential may turn into capacities and attainments conducive to peaceful, healthy and prosperous conditions of life. Human functioning is, in fact, a product of a reciprocal interplay of intrapersonal, behavioural and environmental determinants. Thus, a renewed commitment of psychological science is required to contribute to managing major societal problems.

To this end, progress in personality psychology shows that humans carry extraordinary potential to grow and to develop capacities enabling them to exert a considerable influence over their experience and their course of life. It brings the ‘person’ to the centre of psychological inquiry and appeals to the responsibility that each individual has to ensure that all others be granted the good life to which they aspire and believe they deserve. Equally, it brings to the centre of psychological scrutiny the environments transformed and constructed by humans, and thus the cultures and the social institutions that historically and contextually condition the expressions and the development of individuals. All this ascribes to personality psychology a crucial role in combining knowledge that derives from different domains of psychological investigations, and in casting bridges to other social and biological sciences.

Actually, much progress has been made since my earlier publication in this journal. Progress in genetics and neurosciences has further documented the malleability of human biological endowments that lead to the emergence of mental structures which underly their functioning. Likewise, progress in developmental studies across cultures has further attested to the extraordinary variety of pathways and to the manifold expressions of human diversity. Malleability, emergency and diversity have challenged the idea of entities that, from the very beginning, operate as causes of subsequent courses of life. Rather, they have corroborated the view of personality as a system that develops over the entire course of life and whose functioning is largely conditional on the resources, pressures and opportunities of the social environments in which it occurs.

In this regard, both Bandura’s and Magnusson’s intuitions and contributions have played an important role in addressing the person as a wholeness of mind and body, and in placing individuals’ personality in their social historical context, thereby distancing themselves from any form of biological or social determinism. Both, in fact, acknowledged the large degrees of freedom that human beings hold in charting their course of life and both pointed to the responsibility that societies hold in establishing the conditions for fostering the best expression of individuals’ potentials and for the role that science may have for the betterment of the human condition.

Our tribute to Bandura and Magnusson as models of scientists who put their wisdom and achievements at the service of the common good is largely due.