Stories We Tell About Ourselves May Help To Form Us

“For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality…. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. … Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case.”