Does J. D. Vance Have a Personality?

Common sense tells us that everybody has a personality. But there was a time when many psychologists (e.g., Ross, 1977) seriously challenged what common sense tells us by claiming that people are not consistent enough for personality traits to be attributed to any of us.

Psychologists who challenged the existence of personality asserted that behavior is a function of the situation and that any consistency in behavior is an artifact of being in the same situation. If we look at behaviors across different situations, the personality critics continued, we find that people are too inconsistent to describe them in the language of personality traits. (See Kenrick & Funder, 1988, for a review of situationist critiques of personality.)

The controversy about personality consistency was eventually settled when personality psychologists pointed out that it was wrong-headed for personality critics to look for perfect behavioral consistency across two different situations, because that is not what ordinary people or professional personality psychologists mean by "personality consistency." Rather, personality consistency refers to relatively stable patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in similar situations across time (Johnson, 1997, 1999). Data strongly supports this kind of consistency, indicating that everyone has a personality (Epstein & O'Brien, 1985).

J. D. Vance's Inconsistencies Resurrect Questions about the Existence of Personality

Much has been made in the popular press and social media about the inconsistencies and changes in J. D. Vance's life. For starters, Vance has changed his name numerous times over the 39 years of his life. But more important than name changes, in 2016 Vance referred to Donald Trump as "a cynical asshole," "America's Hitler," and "cultural heroin." That same year, he said, "I can't stomach Trump," "I find him reprehensible," and "I'm a 'Never Trump' guy, I never liked him." But by 2021, when he was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, Vance began saying only positive things about Trump, who endorsed Vance in his campaign. As we all know, eventually Vance changed from a Never-Trumper to Trump's vice-presidential running mate.

Then there is Vance's religious odyssey. Understandably, when he was a child being raised by his grandmother, he initially adopted her belief in Jesus and loathing of organized religion, especially televangelists, whom she called "crooks and perverts."

As he got older, the pain he experienced from living in a dysfunctional family led to constant arguments with his grandmother about whether God really loved them. As a teenager, he reconciled with his father and attended his father's Pentecostal Church. But after a stint in Iraq with the Marines, he became skeptical about many things he had believed, and, by the time he attended college, he read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and began calling himself an atheist. However, he found secular worldviews insufficient for providing meaning in life and eventually converted to Catholicism.

There is no shortage of articles and memes about Vance's inconsistencies. He has been called a shape-shifter, a grifter, a hypocrite, a chameleon, and a flip-flopper. A good example of such an article was written by biomedical scientist Trish Zornio, "Who is J.D. Vance? Even he doesn’t seem to know." The following line from her article summarizes her viewpoint, "The man is a walking set of contradictions, and he might as well have 'Will sell soul for power' tattooed across his forehead."

So, Does J. D. Vance Have a Personality or Not?

In answering this question, it is important to note that those who criticize his inconsistencies are his political opponents. In emphasizing his inconsistencies, his opponents are, in effect, trying to cast doubt on his integrity, reliability, and moral character. Potential biases always endanger the objective assessment of personality.

To get an accurate picture of someone's personality, you do not want to rely only on the person's enemies—or their friends, for that matter. It is possible to find glowing accounts of Vance's personal integrity from conservative sources such as Commentary magazine. But those assessments are probably no more objective than the critiques from liberal sources.

As a personality psychologist, my working assumption is that every person shows enough consistency in their thoughts, feelings, and behavior to say that they have a personality, and that includes J. D. Vance. If we sort through the voluminous material that has been written by Vance and about Vance, I predict that we would find many examples of consistent personality traits.

Personality psychology does not follow the assumption of clinical psychology that one must meet an individual in person to diagnose them. It is, of course, useful to interact directly with a person whose personality we want to assess and, even better, to gather information from people who have had direct contact with the person in various contexts over a significant period of time.

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However, the history of personality psychology is replete with examples of personality assessment through the analysis of written documents. For example, there is Gordon Allport's (1965) famous Letters from Jenny, in which Allport makes personological interpretations based on a collection of 301 letters written by a middle-aged woman over a period of 20 years. In a longitudinal study described in Lives through Time, Jack Block and Norma Haan (1983) used a more structured approach, applying the California Q-sort to assess "case assemblies" (folders containing assorted documents about the research participants).

There is also a significant literature on the use of expert judgments of the personalities of U.S. presidents from secondary data such political speeches (Araya, 2021; Nai & Maier, 2021; Pfiffner, 2003). These studies show that partisan raters struggle to be objective, but experts can set aside biases to make reliable and valid judgments about the personalities of politicians.

As a personality assessment expert without political affiliation, I would like to think that I could objectively evaluate documents written by and about J. D. Vance and offer an assessment of his personality. However, I am refraining from presenting an assessment of Vance here, because best practices for judging another person's personality require multiple judges to confirm measurement reliability and objectivity (Hofstee, 1994). I would also like to make it clear that the purpose of this post is to increase understanding about personality consistency, not to defend or criticize Vance's apparent inconsistencies.

Nonetheless, as an exercise in assessing personality from written documents, I suggest that the reader study the emails exchanged between Vance and Sofia Nelson, a transgender former Yale Law School classmate. Excerpts of the exchange were releasted by The New York Times. Although the friendship ended when Nelson discovered that Vance did not support gender-affirming medical treatments for adolescents, the emails seem to indicate genuine affection between Vance and Nelson.

For example, in one email, Vance apologized to Nelson portraying her gender identity inaccurately in his book Hillbilly Elegy: "I recognize now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I’m really sorry. . . . I hope you recognize that the description came from a place of ignorance, when I first started writing years ago. I hope you're not offended, but if you are, I'm sorry!" He signs the email "Love you, JD."

In her reply, Nelson calls Vance "buddy" and "sweet" and signed her email "Love, Sofia."

The emails also indicate positions held by Vance that differ considerably from statements he has made as a candidate for vice president. A spokesperson for Vance issued the following statement to The New York Times regarding Vance's apparent inconsistencies between the emails and his current positions: "Senator Vance values his friendships with individuals across the political spectrum. He has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he changed his mind on President Trump. Despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best."

I encourage the reader to compare for yourself what J. D. Vance wrote before and after he became the vice presidential nominee. Ask your friends (ideally from across the political spectrum) to do the same and compare notes. See whether you can identify possible consistencies that might underlie the apparent inconsistencies in J. D. Vance's personality.