Examining Paradoxes in Personality Coherence: To What Extent Will Novel, Ambiguous, and Uncertain Situations Reveal Personality?

Caspi and Moffitt have told an intriguing and provocative tale about the nature of behavior during transitions. They argue that continuities or consistencies in personality are best revealed during life events that are novel, ambiguous, and uncertain. To marshall support for their thesis, they demonstrate breathtaking scholarship both in historical depth and in the breadth of the fields covered. They bring to bear work from personality psychology, clinical psychology, social cognition, animal learning, behavior genetics, sociology, and anthropology. Their argument is bold, original, and intuitively appealing. Caspi and Moffitt identify literature that is consistent with their general formulation that the coherence of personality is best revealed during novel, ambiguous, and uncertain life circumstances. They claim broad explanatory power for their thesis, so I wondered, not about the possibility for refutation, but rather about the precision and the extent of generalization possible. How close does an example have to be to fit the pattern they propose? Are there examples that do not fit? What kind of story might they tell?