PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Roberts, Robins / BROAD DISPOSITIONS, ASPIRATIONS Broad Dispositions, Broad Aspirations: The Intersection of Personality Traits and Major Life Goals

Do personality traits predict the goals a person chooses to pursue in life? The present study examined the relation between person-ality traits and major life goals, which are broad, far-reaching agendas for important life domains (N = 672). The authors used both theoretical and empirical procedures to organize a set of life goals into thematic content clusters (economic, aesthetic, social, relationship, political, hedonistic, religious); the result-ing goal clusters constitute a preliminary taxonomy of motive units based on the fundamental value domains identified in the literature. The authors examined gender differences on each goal cluster and related the goal clusters to individual differences in the Big Five and narcissism. High extraversion and low agree-ableness (e.g., narcissism) was the most common profile associ-ated with major life goals, and neuroticism was essentially unre-lated to the importance of major life goals. Findings confirmed expectations derived from previous research and from Socioanalytic and narcissism theories. As individuals, we often wrestle with the tension between who we are and what we want to become. This tension also is manifested within the field of personality psychology. Over the past few decades, two distinct lines of research—one focused on who people are (disposi-tions) and the other on what people desire to become (motives or goals)—have traveled separate paths (Win-ter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). Disposi-tional researchers have searched for a generalizable tax-onomy of personality trait terms and have emphasized issues of personality structure. In recent years, dispo-sitional researchers have achieved a milestone in devel-oping a superordinate taxonomy of trait terms labeled the Five-Factor Model (FFM) (Goldberg, 1993; McCrae & John, 1992; Wiggins & Trapnell, 1997). This taxonomy provides a much-needed integration of trait terms and facilitates the task of integrating dispositions with other constructs, such as motives. Proponents of the FFM argue that the dimensions o