Openness to experience and ego level in Loevinger's Sentence Completion Test: Dispositional contributions to developmental models of personality.

This article is concerned with the relationship between two distinct traditions in personality research: the dimensional or individual differences approach and the developmental stage or type approach. Research bridging these two traditions has been scarce although the possibility of measuring ego levels with self-report scales (Lorr & Manning, 1978) and the contribution of personality traits to the attainment of stages of moral development (Hogan, Johnson, & Emler, 1978) have been addressed. Both of these studies concentrated on dispositions or traits particularly relevant to interpersonal conduct or socialization . The present article considers the role of traits in the inner experiential aspects of ego development. Empirically, it tests the hypothesis that openness to experi