ABSTRACT
The lesson people should learn from this is that personality changes are often present only in the eye of the beholder. Many social scientists, and others interested in explaining human behavior, think that human beings are governed by deep and relatively unchanging components of the personality or self, so that important changes at late stages in the life cycle are viewed as anomalies that need to be explained away. The processes indicate that social structure creates the conditions for both change and stability in adult life. The process of situational adjustment allows us to account for the changes people undergo as they move through various situations in their adult life. The process of commitment, in which externally unrelated interests of the person become linked in such a way as to constrain future behavior, suggests an approach to the problem of personal stability in the face of changing situations.
