Personality psychology as the integrative study of traits and worldviews

•Traits and worldviews are equally basic aspects of personality.•Traits constitute objective patterns of behavior.•Worldviews imbue experiences and actions with subjective meanings.•Personality psychologists have neglected to study worldviews systematically.•Trait-worldview integration affords richer and more unified personality portraits.

Personality psychology inevitably studies human beings not just as mechanical systems, but also as rational agents, whose experiences and actions are imbued with meaning. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the implications of taking this core element of personality psychology seriously, and to thereby contribute to the development of an integrative and normative framework for the field. I argue that personality can be studied both through trait constructs, referring to objective behavioral regularities, and through worldview constructs, referring to subjective sources of meaning, and try to show that worldviews are, contrary to popular belief, not inherently less universal, or in other ways less basic, than traits. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of more systematic study of worldviews, integration across the trait-worldview divide, and complementing the individual differences approach with personalistic methodology, for the development of richer and more unified portraits of personalities.