Dr. Will Fleeson Announced as the 2026 Recipient of the Murray-Helson Award from the Association of Research in Personality

Dr. Fleeson earned the award for distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. Professor Fleeson will be honored at the biennial ARP conference in June 2027, where he will give an invited address.

The Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson Award, established in 1978,
recognizes outstanding scientific and humanistic scholarship in the
psychological study of individual human lives. The award is named for
Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson, pioneering personality
psychologists. Henry A. Murray is probably best known for the 1938
volume, Explorations in Personality. Ravenna Helson published
groundbreaking papers on the study of women’s lives, personality
structure and development among creative scientists and artists, and
other topics, and she launched the iconic Mills College longitudinal
study.  In the decades since both Murray’s and Helson’s foundational
contributions, these pioneering researchers envisioned a broad-based,
integrative approach to studying human lives in their biological and
cultural contexts, bringing together psychology, sociology, cultural
anthropology, psychoanalysis, the biological and medical sciences, and
even literary studies under the banner of what Murray called
personology. The personological tradition in the psychological and
social sciences emphasizes the complex interplay between biology and
culture in shaping human behavior, the inherent unity and synthesizing
power of individual personality, the development of personality across
the life course, the blending of nomothetic and idiographic approaches
to examining human personality, the integration of what Murray called
“the tough and the tender” in psychology, and the role of imagination,
narrative, biography, and myth in the study of lives. As articulated
below, Dr. Fleeson’s accomplishments as a scholar exemplify these
themes.

Professor Fleeson’s scholarship has transformed how personality
psychologists understand the relationship between person and context.
His landmark 2001 demonstration that individuals vary enormously in
their trait-relevant behavior from one hour to the next, while
remaining remarkably stable in the aggregate (Fleeson, 2001), offered
a major step towards resolving the person-situation debate that had
divided the field for decades: variability and consistency are not
rivals but two complementary aspects of the same personality.
Subsequent work documented both normative tendencies and individual
differences in how manifestations of Big Five behavior depends on
situations, and identified the social and motivational mechanisms
through which traits are produced. Building on these foundations, he
co-developed (with Eranda Jayawickreme) Whole Trait Theory, which
unites the descriptive side of traits, captured as density
distributions of states, with the explanatory side, the motivational
and social-cognitive processes that generate those states. Its most
recent elaboration introduces the mechanism of constrained accretion
to explain how broad traits themselves come into being, placing
biological and sociocultural forces at the center of the synergies and
conflicts that bind trait-relevant behaviors together (Fleeson &
Jayawickreme, 2026). Alongside this, his GLIDE-STRIDE model of adult
personality development (Fleeson & Jolley, 2006; Noftle & Fleeson,
2015) and his earlier research on adult development across the life
course have located personality within the unfolding of lives over
time, integrating macro-developmental factors such as genetics,
environment, and identity with micro-mechanisms such as goal pursuit
and the interpretation of situations. Throughout, his empirical
program has drawn on experience sampling, experiments, self and
observer reports, and cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.

Professor Fleeson has also been one of the field’s most generous
builders of intellectual community, bridging psychological science
with humanistic perspectives. Over the past fifteen years he has led
or co-led three major initiatives supporting early-career scientists:
The Character Project (2010–2013), The Beacon Project (2015–2018), for
which he served as Principal Investigator, and The Honesty Project
(2020–2023). He recently co-led an interdisciplinary project on the
epistemic traits that promote good thinking and resistance to
misinformation. Each of these efforts has brought psychologists into
sustained conversation with philosophers and theologians around a
shared question: what does it mean to be a good person, and how can
that be studied rigorously? His own answers have come from two
complementary directions. He has studied borderline personality
disorder and the emotion dynamics that differentiate forms of
psychopathology (Mneimne et al., 2021); and he has also studied
morally exceptional people and the nature of moral exemplarity
(Fleeson et al., 2024). Treating the clinical and the moral as twin
“centrifuges” for understanding the whole person, he has defended the
empirical study of character against situationist critiques by showing
how the aggregation of within-person data reveals stable moral
dispositions, and advanced a theory of cultural paragons according to
which people learn how to be good from the biographies of real
individuals and from the characters of their culture’s literature,
film, and mythology. Reflecting this breadth, his work has appeared
not only across the subfields of psychology but also in philosophy and
education.  This work particularly elegantly blends “the tough and the
tender.”

In all of this, Professor Fleeson’s career gives contemporary form to
the personological vision that Murray and Helson set in motion. Murray
insisted that personality possesses a unity and synthesizing power
that the diversity of a person’s behavior does not negate; Whole Trait
Theory gives that conviction a clear and testable expression, locating
intrapsychic structure and thematic coherence beneath the variability
of daily life. Murray and Helson both held that persons must be
understood within their biological and cultural contexts and across
the full arc of their development; Fleeson’s work is an exemplar of
that call. The personological tradition sought to blend nomothetic and
idiographic approaches rather than choose between them; Whole Trait
Theory was deliberately constructed to integrate both (Fleeson &
Jayawickreme, 2026). Finally, just as Helson found in creative
scientists and artists a window onto personality structure and
development, Fleeson has found complementary windows in moral
exemplars and in people with borderline personality disorder, while
his theory of cultural paragons restores biography, literature, and
culture to their rightful place as sources of knowledge about how good
lives are lived. The committee is delighted to honor a scholar whose
work has substantially advanced the study of individual lives and
whole persons.