Personality has been depreciated as a contributor to addiction. Yet, it is obvious that some people's personalities are part and parcel of their addictive habits. Stanton reviews critiques of personality theories, evidence of personality's role in addiction, and the interaction among personality and setting and life-history factors, integrating all together into a complete model of addiction.

In D.A. Ward (Ed.), Alcoholism: Introduction to theory and treatment (3rd ed.), Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt, 1990, pp. 147-156
© Copyright 1990 Stanton Peele. All rights reserved.

Stanton Peele
Morristown, NJ

The belief that personality plays a role in alcoholism — that it may even be the major or sole cause — has a long tradition. Nineteenth-century theorizing — both popular and medical — on alcoholism and narcotic addiction frequently focused on the "degeneracy" of the addict or alcoholic. Degeneracy was a global concept: thought to be inherited, it encompassed criminality, feeblemindedness or retardation, sexual promiscuity, et al., along with drug and drinking excesses. By the twentieth century, explanations for alcoholism and addiction were regularly put forward by psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Probably the most popular psychoanalytic view twenty to forty years ago was that alcoholics have a dependent personality, probably created by an unusually great dependence on their parents in childhood (see Vaillant, 1983). The psychoanalytic concept of orality, based on the idea that some people are preoccupied with oral consumption, was also often at the heart of early psychiatric theories of alcoholism.

But even brief reflection on such personality factors illustrates the problems personality theories must confront. Are all people who have oral fixations alcoholics? What about those who bite their nails and are also said to be stalled in the oral stage of development — why do they chew their nails instead of drinking excessively? In the same vein, don't many overly dependent people simply become dependent on a lover or some ritual, rather than drinking too much? Theories associated with psychoanalysis have generally had difficulty answering such questions, and few people today take seriously the idea of a "dependent" or "oral" personality that characterizes all alcoholics.

These issues illustrate the methodological problems of necessary and sufficient cause: do all alcoholics have similar personalities, and does everyone with a certain "alcoholic personality" become an alcoholic? The answer to these two questions is almost certainly "no," and the recognition that this is the case has brought about a more sophisticated exploration of the topic of personality in alcoholism. At the same time, many have become skeptical that personality is an important factor in alcoholism. Unfortunately, skepticism about the existence of an alcoholic personality may have caused many to throw out the baby with the bath water, and to fail to see clear links that have been established between personality traits and alcoholism.

What is personality?

Personality is based on the individual's distinct and consistent outlooks and actions or overall style of behavior. Inherited or biological traits are not personality traits except inasmuch as they influence behavior. For example, if level of energy is an inherited trait, a person could be predisposed to having a highly energized and active personality or a passive and "laid back" one. Even so, many aspects of the person's personality would remain to be filled out by the person's life experiences, particularly within the family. Obviously, many other biological traits — such as height — are not part of personality, although they may influence it. Some other examples and counter-examples of personality traits: achievement orientation is a personality trait while intelligence is not; a bright or optimistic outlook (or a negative, pessimistic one) is a personality characteristic while a set of political beliefs is not.

Is Behavior Consistent?

In 1968, distinguished personality theorist Walter Mischel pointed out that correlations between a person's behavior in one setting and another are often surprisingly low — rarely exceeding .30 (a perfect correlation is 1.0). For example, people we label very talkative may hardly talk at all at a formal gathering. If personality traits are so inconsistent, Mischel reasoned, then they may be very poor ways to characterize individuals and to explain human behavior. Other theorists, notably Richard Nisbett (1980), took this argument farther and argued that personality traits are merely cognitive delusions people create regarding their friends and family in order to give their worlds and their relationships an artificial aura of predictability.

Yet, people we know seem to have personalities. We feel that they act in consistent ways. Psychologists who believe people are characterized by distinct personalities have sought explanations for why it is hard to get similar measures of personality traits for individuals in different situations. David Funder, for example, has shown that people may vary on some traits from situation to situation, but they can be characterized in different situations by central traits that are important to the individual's identity. When asked about traits that are very true of a particular individual, Funder found, there is often strong agreement among friends, family and the individual that the individual is characterized by this trait, even though these different people see the person in very different situations (Funder & Dobroth, 1987).

In the alcoholism field, there has been a general rejection of broad personality theories in alcoholism by researchers. This is because different studies have not consistently found the same personality traits to characterize different groups of alcoholics. Indeed, sometimes different studies have found alcoholics have both more and less of some traits (Miller, 1976)! The principal argument against the idea that people's personalities predispose them to become alcoholic has been that personality traits observed in alcoholics are the result and not the cause of their alcoholism. That is, if alcoholics frequently appear to lack motivation or to be aggressive and antisocial, this is due to their years of drinking and does not represent their original personality.

Based on these issues, we must keep the following questions about personality and alcoholism in mind:

1. Do alcoholics as a group of people fit into one or more distinct personality patterns?
2. Do people with personalities associated with alcoholism inevitably, frequently, or infrequently become alcoholics, or do they often express this personal disposition in some other way?
3. Can we systematically establish that many different groups of alcoholics have similar personality traits, and that groups of nonalcoholics do not display these traits?
4. Can we establish the existence of particular personality traits that characterize alcoholics prior to their heavy drinking, so as to establish personality traits as a cause of alcoholism?
5. Finally, can we fit the different personality factors connected with alcoholism into an overall picture of the development and persistence of alcoholism, so as both to make sense and to be useful in dealing with alcoholism?