Commentary

Human Development 2005;48:298–302

DOI: 10.1159/000086874

Sexual Lives: The Development of Traits,

Adaptations, and Stories
Dan P. McAdams
Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., USA

Key Words
Adaptions ` Life stories ` Personality ` Sexuality ` Traits

In applying a life-course perspective to the study of human sexuality, Phillip

L. Hammack has opened up an intellectual space where theories emphasizing the
biology of sexual orientation may find ways to connect to those documenting the
power of social constructionism. Hammack points out that essentialist and contex-
tualist approaches to human sexual orientation are both successful in making com-
pelling arguments and garnering convincing data for their respective points of view.
But neither side in this misunderstood ‘debate’ is able to account for the wide range
of empirical findings on sexual orientation and to capture the full gamut of lived
sexual experience. An integrative life-course perspective enables Hammack to
carve out a nuanced and complex middle ground. In Hammack’s view, people live
out multifaceted sexual lives that evolve over time, sometimes in unpredictable
ways, as biologically driven sexual desire interacts with the constellation of identity
options offered by culture. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are not natural
kinds, nor are they arbitrary societal labels. Sexual lives evolve as a product of af-
fective and motivational dispositions, changing patterns of interpersonal relation-
ships, available social roles and mores, prevailing sexual narratives, historical
events, chance encounters, and the timing of lives. And different developmental
trajectories may be expected for women versus men.
In his effort to reconcile essentialist and contextualist points of view in the
study of human sexual orientation, Hammack raises fundamental issues – nature
versus nurture, biology versus culture, reductionism versus holism – that have
stirred debates in many different arenas of the social sciences. The integrative
framework that Hammack proposes resonates well with recent developments, for
example, in the field of personality psychology, wherein scientists have struggled to
explain human individuality in ways that do justice to broad personal dispositions
and the situated nature of human conduct [Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Mischel &
Shoda, 1995]. Hammack’s life-course perspective, with its emphasis on the multi-

Ó2005 S. Karger AG, Basel Dan P. McAdams

0018–716X/05/0485–0298$22.00/0 The Foley Center for the Study of Lives
Fax + 41 61 306 12 34 Northwestern University, 2120 Campus Drive
E-Mail karger@karger.ch Accessible online at: Evanston, IL 60208 (USA)
www.karger.com www.karger.com/hde E-Mail dmca@northwestern.edu
faceted and evolving nature of human sexuality, reflects emerging integrative ideas
in the study of personality more generally. Recent theoretical trends suggest that
personality itself may be viewed as an evolving and culturally constructed pattern-
ing of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life stories
[Hooker & McAdams, 2003; McAdams, 1995, 1996; Sheldon, 2004]. All three of
these aspects – traits, adaptations, and stories – are reflected in Hammack’s broad
perspective on human sexuality.

Sexuality as Trait

In personality psychology, dispositional traits are those broad, stable, decon-

textualized, and implicitly comparative dimensions of human individuality that go
by such names as ‘extraversion,’ ‘conscientiousness,’ ‘friendliness,’ ‘gullibility,’
and ‘the tendency to feel vulnerable.’ While trait theories were once castigated as
mere lists of labels for stereotyping people [Mischel, 1968], the past twenty years of
research in personality psychology convincingly show that self-report trait scales
measure important individual differences in people and that these differences (1) are
at least moderately heritable, (2) show substantial inter-individual stability over time
(especially in the adult years), (3) predict broad trends in behavior aggregated across
situations and over time, and (4) are associated with important life outcomes, such
as occupational success, health and well-being, and even longevity [Matthews,
Deary, & Whiteman, 2003]. Furthermore, decades of factor-analytic studies have
resulted in something of a consensus in the field regarding the universe of trait de-
scriptors. Many personality psychologists today believe that dispositional traits can
be grouped into five broad content domains, often called the Big Five [Goldberg,
1993]. Most commonly, the Big Five are named extraversion (versus introversion),
neuroticism (negative affectivity), conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness
to experience. Taken together, individual differences on these five broad traits pro-
vide a dispositional signature for human individuality [McAdams, 1995].
Trait theories represent personality psychology’s most essentialist perspectives.
Typically viewed as the elaboration of inborn temperament dispositions, adult traits
like extraversion and neuroticism are conceived as internal properties of individuals
that transcend history and culture. In a parallel discourse, essentialist perspectives in
the study of sexuality view sexual orientation as ‘an ahistorical, universal, context-
independent underlying trait of the individual’ (Hammack, this issue, p. 270). ‘Con-
text matters to the essentialist only as it constrains, prohibits, or facilitates phenotypic
expression.’ These words read like chapter-and-verse in the doctrinal writings of trait
theorists like McCrae and Costa [1990]. They see basic traits like extraversion to be
the underlying, foundational dimensions of human individuality, the psychological
genotypes whose phenotypic, behavioral expressions are influenced by the demand
characteristics of situations and social norms. More nuanced perspectives on traits,
however, follow the kind of argument that Hammack makes for sexuality. Biologi-
cally driven differences in sexual orientation produce real preferences in desire, just
as temperamental differences in personality more generally predispose individuals to
follow certain affective and behavioral paths. Yet these differences are profoundly
contoured by culture and they interact with a host of other forces in the making of
human lives.

The Making of Sexual Lives Human Development 299

2005;48:298–302
 Roles and Goals

Beyond dispositional traits in personality lies a vast psychological geography

that is marked by motives, goals, plans, strivings, projects, values, strategies, sche-
mas, concerns, and domain-specific skills and styles that are contextualized in time,
place, and/or social role. These characteristic adaptations specify aspects of human
individuality that are less general and less stable than dispositional traits and more
apt to change with changing environmental demands, shifting social roles, and the
passing of developmental time. Personality psychologists who study these kinds of
constructs tend to view human lives as somewhat more contingent and culturally
determined than do classic trait theorists [e.g., Little, 1999; Mischel & Shoda,
1995]. Yet, a full scientific accounting of human individuality requires a concerted
examination of both stable dispositions and those features of personality that speak
to the shifting social and cultural ecology of everyday life [McAdams, 1995]. If
traits sketch an outline of human individuality, characteristic adaptations such as
goals and roles fill in many of the details.
Hammack identifies many aspects of human sexual orientation that are akin to
the kinds of constructs that personality psychologists group under characteristic
adaptations. For example, Herdt’s [1981] classic study of the Sambia of Papua New
Guinea highlighted culturally determined characteristic adaptations among adoles-
cent males who perform oral sex on adult men in accord with role demands specific
to a particular developmental period. These ritualized performances, and the emo-
tional and relational dynamics that are associated with them, have little to do with
underlying traits, and yet they assume center stage during a particular period of
psychosocial development. Role-based adaptations are also evidenced in the
‘mummy-baby relations’ between adolescent females in contemporary Lesotho, in
the sexual sisterhoods of 19th-century China, via the characterization of ‘fairies’
and ‘trade’ in the gay culture of early 20th-century New York, among heterosexual
black men today who enact the sexual scripts of the ‘down-low’ or ‘homo-thug,’
and in countless other examples wherein expressions of sexuality work in the ser-
vice of particular goals, roles, domain-specific demands, and/or in accord with de-
velopmental scripts and cultural or subcultural norms. Einstein may (or may not)
have said, ‘God is in the details.’ But for sure, a great deal of sex is there – in the
details that make up the social ecology of lives, in the contingencies and shifting
contexts, sequestered within particular categories of relationships or particular
stages of development, played out in accord with both internal and external factors
that go well beyond our dispositional traits.

Stories of Lived Experience

If people found it unnecessary to find meaning and purpose in their lives, then
personality could be confined to traits and adaptations. But such is not the case.
Recent theorizing in personality psychology, and a growing body of research,
works from the premise that people try to make sense of their own lives by con-
structing self-defining stories – integrative life stories that serve to reconstruct the
past and imagine the future in such a way as to provide a life with some semblance
of unity, purpose, and meaning [Josselson & Lieblich, 1993; McAdams, 1996;

300 Human Development McAdams

2005;48:298–302
Singer, 2004; Tomkins, 1987]. Life stories add a third layer to personality. While
traits speak to broad behavioral trends and adaptations specify many of the particu-
larities of a human life in social context, integrative life stories represent people’s
efforts to put it all together into an internalized and evolving narrative of selfhood,
or what Singer [2004] calls a narrative identity. It is probably through narrative
identity, furthermore, that the most exquisite interactions between self and culture
are made manifest [McAdams, 2005]. Culture provides people with a long menu of
stories. People choose some, reject others, and modify, refine, and appropriate oth-
ers in order to make their lives make sense within the narrative opportunities and
challenges their culture has to offer. Narrative identity, then, is a psychosocial con-
struction – co-authored, as it were, by the person whose story it is and the social/
cultural/historical world wherein that particular person lives and tells. Life stories
evolve over time. The past is reworked and the future is re-anticipated in accord
with changing life chances and circumstances, in response to on-time and off-time
life events, and with respect to new developmental demands that sometimes call out
for a new narrative to make meaning of what no longer seems meaningful.
Hammack writes, ‘Realization and acknowledgment of same-sex desire re-
quires revision of the personal narrative one constructs over the life course’
(p. 281). But, as Hammack also makes clear, one does not make up a self-defining
sexual story out of thin air. Culture provides a variety of narrative options regard-
ing same-sex and opposite-sex desire. In contemporary American society, one stan-
dard narrative form goes this way: A young boy ‘knows’ early on in life that he
feels attraction to others of his same sex; he may ignore or fight against what he
comes to see as an odd predisposition within; he may eventually ‘date’ women and
engage in other activities to ‘pass’ as heterosexual; with time, he may accept his
sexuality, and then he may come out. Coming out is the most powerful metaphor
for this kind of narrative. The protagonist comes out of the dark and into the light,
revealing the truth that has been hidden for so long, revealing it both to others and
to himself, bidding now for acceptance and affirmation within a community of oth-
ers who are living similar stories. Hammack points out that women typically do not
display the same sexual milestones in their narratives of same-sex desire. By con-
trast, their stories are often about ‘sexual fluidity, permissive experimentation, and
identity flexibility.’ Men and women find that different narrative forms fit their
different lived experiences. And different narrative forms may also fit the expecta-
tions that society holds for how men and how women feel and do sexuality.
Stories of lived sexual experience are also shaped by historical events. Cohler
[2005] describes the different narrative possibilities available to gay men across a
series of historical cohorts. Gay men who came of age before World War II con-
structed self-defining sexual stories in a society that refused to make narrative room
for scenes of ‘coming out.’ As Hammack describes it, ‘Pre-war gay life was charac-
terized by massive secrecy, furtive sex, and the inevitability of marriage and repro-
duction’ (p. 276). By contrast, cohorts who entered adolescence after the Stonewall
Inn riots of 1969 were able to assimilate their own narratives to the unfolding saga
of the Gay Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The discovery of AIDS in
the early 1980s added another, much more troubling, source of material for the
making of the sexual self. Homosexual behavior was again made dangerous, associ-
ated now with severe illness and death. Cohorts coming of age in the 1980s faced
new challenges – both for their life stories and their very lives – that were simply

The Making of Sexual Lives Human Development 301

2005;48:298–302
unknowable for gay men of previous generations. What it means to be gay and the
stories that people construct to convey that meaning continues to evolve as history
moves forward. The most significant events likely to shape sexual stories in the
21st century include the development of effective AIDS treatments in the 1990s,
the emergence of gay/straight alliances in high schools and colleges, states’ initia-
tives to legalize gay marriage, and the eruption in very recent years of a re-ener-
gized anti-gay rhetoric in the United States, coming largely from the political and
religious right.
A full-bodied, life-course perspective on sexual orientation must, like a full
account of human personality more generally, come to understand the many facets
of an evolving sexual life set in time and culture. Sexual traits, adaptations, and
stories all assume prominent positions in the complex patterning of a sexual life.
Phillip Hammack provides a compelling integrative perspective for making theo-
retical sense of the complexity. His model enriches social science theory and sets
an exciting direction for future research.

References

Cohler, B.J. (2005). Writing desire: Generation and the life story by men having sex with other men.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Goldberg, L.R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26–
34.
Herdt, G. (1981). Guardians of the flutes: Idioms of masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hooker, K., & McAdams, D.P. (2003). Personality reconsidered: A new agenda for aging research.
Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B, P296–P304.
Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (Eds.). (1993). The narrative study of lives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kenrick, D.T., & Funder, D. (1988). Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation
debate. American Psychologist, 43, 23–34.
Little, B. (1999). Personality and motivation: Personal action and the conative evolution. In L.A. Pervin
and O. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd Ed., pp. 501–524). New
York: Guilford Press.
Matthews, G., Deary, I., & Whiteman, D. (2003). Personality traits (2nd Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McAdams, D.P. (1995). What do we know when we know a person? Journal of Personality, 63, 365–
396.
McAdams, D.P. (1996). Personality, modernity, and the storied self: A contemporary framework for
studying persons. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 295–321.
McAdams, D.P. (2005). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York: Oxford University
Press.
McCrae, R.R., & Costa, P., Jr. (1990). Personality in adulthood. New York: Guilford Press.
Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York: Wiley.
Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective-system theory of personality: Reconceptualiz-
ing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological
Review, 102, 246–268.
Sheldon, K. (2004). The psychology of optimal being. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Singer, J.A. (2004). Narrative identity and meaning-making across the adult lifespan. Journal of Per-
sonality, 72, 437–459.
Tomkins, S.S. (1987). Script theory. In J. Aronoff, A.I. Rabin & R.A. Zucker (Eds.), The emergence of
personality (pp. 147–216). New York: Springer.

302 Human Development McAdams

2005;48:298–302