Narrative identity in the social world

Narrative as a component of personality has a long history in the field, but it is only within the last two decades that it has been fully accepted into contemporary approaches to personality (e.g., McAdams & Pals, 2006). One part of the flourishing of the field of narrative psychology has been the attention paid to the social and cultural contexts of narrative production. Yet this work has been somewhat outside the reach of personality psychology, occurring more often within the fields of developmental, cognitive and social psychology (e.g., Fivush, Haden & Reese, 2006). One of the reasons for this separation is the attention to how social and cultural contexts change narration, and a focus on malleability in psychological phenomena has not traditionally been under the purview of personality psychology. We aim to merge these areas of study - personality and social and cultural contexts of narration - by focusing on the role that those contexts play in the stability of narrative as a component of personality.