Robert McCrae
American personality psychologist associated with the National Institute on Aging
American personality researcher who, with Paul Costa, developed the NEO Personality Inventory and helped establish the five-factor model, and who formulated five-factor theory and studied how traits vary across age and culture.
Why this person matters
Working with Costa, McCrae helped produce the NEO PI-R and five-factor theory, which holds that traits develop along largely intrinsic paths. His cross-cultural work compared age trends across countries. The five-factor model is a joint product of Costa and McCrae and of earlier trait research by others.
Main contributions
NEO inventory and NEO PI-R
He co-developed the NEO model with Costa, who shares the credit: a three-factor version in 1978, the NEO PI in 1985 and the 240-item NEO PI-R in 1992, which added agreeableness and conscientiousness and measures six facets in each of five domains.
Five-factor theory
A 2005 Baltimore paper he co-authored describes five-factor theory as holding that traits follow intrinsic developmental paths, shaped by biological processes common to humans and largely independent of environmental influences. The paper notes that the theory does not predict which specific age changes will occur.
Age and cultural comparisons
The 2005 analysis found changes of about 0.1 standard deviations per decade. Its facet-level slopes correlated .73 with cross-sectional age trends from 12 other cultures. His publisher biography describes recent work centred on cross-cultural studies of personality.
Context and limits
Critics say factor analysis alone is too limited (Block), that the number of factors lacks an agreed basis, and that the evidence relies heavily on self-report. Juni argued that the model behind the NEO is atheoretical and that its popularity owes partly to its authors. Cheung and colleagues (2011) suggest Openness is poorly supported in Asian samples. The 2005 authors note that the Baltimore sample is not representative of the United States population and that a single self-report measure was used.
In your introductory course
Personality.The five-factor model and NEO PI-R appear in the personality chapter as a leading trait approach. McCrae's age and cross-cultural findings are cited in discussions of whether personality changes in adulthood.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 11.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1976
Received his PhD in personality psychology from Boston University.
- 1978
Described the three-factor NEO model with Paul Costa.
- 1985
Published the NEO PI with Costa.
- 1992
Published the NEO PI-R with Costa.
- 2005
Co-authored the Baltimore Longitudinal Study analysis of NEO PI-R age trajectories in Psychology and Aging.
Sources
- PubMed Central (NIH author manuscript), Terracciano, McCrae, Brant and Costa, Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of NEO-PI-R Scales in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, Psychology and Aging 20(3)Original work. Text passages inspected.
- SAGE Encyclopedia of Counseling, Costa, Paul T., 1942 and McCrae, Robert R., 1949Publisher. Reference article inspected.
- Guilford Press, Robert R. McCrae, author biographyPublisher. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Big Five personality traitsReference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, Revised NEO Personality InventoryReference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, Robert R. McCraeReference work. Reference article inspected.