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The Person as Actor, the Actor as Person: Personality from a Dramaturgical Perspective

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Abstract

The study of personality has long comprised of the major subfields of psychology. Phrenology provided an early means of assessing the distinctive personalities of people, and it enjoyed some dramatic appeal. Now, the technical capacity to examine brain structure and function by means of fMRI has a similar appeal, with a firmer scientific foundation. The assessment of human personality can be seen as portraiture, as a means of fitting people to the requirements of their roles, as a way of diagnosing psychopathology, or as a technique for describing the essential dimensions of human life. This chapter is a critical examination of this enterprise in terms of dramatic devices, including deception.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.

–Erving Goffman (1959, p. 72)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This point of view is developed fully in The Drama of Everyday Life (Scheibe, 2000).

  2. 2.

    See Allport’s (1955) Becoming.

  3. 3.

    See, for example, Freeman (1993), Mishler (1999), Gergen (1999), Pillemer (1998), Singer and Salovey (1993), and Wood and Kroger (2000) as well as Scheibe and Barrett (2017).

  4. 4.

    Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery.

  5. 5.

    See Cochran (1986).

  6. 6.

    See the discussion in Gould (1981, chap. 5).

  7. 7.

    See Hogan (2002).

  8. 8.

    “There are thousands of personality measures in the published literature, and an overwhelming number of them are designed to assess elements of psychopathology” (Hogan 2002, p. 6).

  9. 9.

    The classic reference for self-presentation is Goffman (1959). See Kleinmutz (1967) for a discussion of response sets (reference on impression management as well—Tedeschi, Schlenker).

  10. 10.

    Quotes are from the MBTI manual (Myers & McCaulley, 1985).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, USA

    Karl E. Scheibe

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  1. Karl E. Scheibe
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Scheibe, K.E. (2017). The Person as Actor, the Actor as Person: Personality from a Dramaturgical Perspective. In: Deep Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62986-5_2

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