Broad Policy Issues Regarding the Form , Style , and Substance of Research Articles Greater Emphasis on Description

Since the early 1990s, the field of personality psychology has matured as a science, growing in prominence, recognition, and respectability (perhaps more outside of psychology than within). Contemporary personality science—at its best—is characterized by an emphasis on explanation as opposed to description, even in trait/structural approaches that have long been disparaged for their failure to attend to explanatory mechanisms. It is also characterized by increasing (and increasingly successful) efforts to link personality across levels of analysis, from internal biological processes to macrolevel, sociocultural phenomena, and to connect to and draw on other fields as a way to understand personality, and its origins, dynamics, and consequences. Also on the rise are increasingly sophisticated efforts to understand and study the person as a dynamic whole, embedded in a larger, sociocultural context. Finally, concerted efforts have been undertaken to document and establish the relevance of personality to real-world processes and outcomes; thus, making a compelling case for personality’s “place at the table.” These developments, in many cases made possible by significant methodological and statistical advances, make personality science the exciting area of study it is today. Nevertheless, a number of serious issues have been raised in recent years concerning the replicability and integrity of psychological research. Although, for the most part, these criticisms have not been aimed specifically at personality psychology, no area within psychology is immune (Roberts, 2011). As the premier outlet for empirical work in personality and individual differences, I believe that Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences (JPSP:PPID) is not only in a unique position to take a lead role in addressing these issues but also has a special responsibility to do so. Recent analyses establish in a very convincing manner that the proportion of positive results reported in the psychological literature (Bakker, van Dijk, & Wicherts, 2012) far exceeds what would be expected given the low power (Pashler & Harris, 2012) of the typical study published in psychology. Indeed, Pashler and Harris (2012) estimated that 56% of published findings are false positives, whereas Ioannidis (2012) argued that the proportion of false positives could reach as high as 95%, assuming even modest levels of publication bias. Regardless of where the actual percentage lies, such analyses are sobering and point to the need to reevaluate both how we define good science and how we weigh the strengths and weaknesses of articles submitted for publication. Although wholesale changes are neither prudent nor practical (after all, there is much to applaud about contemporary research on personality and individual differences), I describe below several changes in editorial policy and practice that will be undertaken during my term as editor, with the goal of broadening the definition of what we consider to be good science and, more long term, of increasing the “truth value” of research in the field of personality science.