Based on his experience with TAT measures, Veroff (1983) has proposed that personality must be defined within historical, developmental, and social contexts. Several alternative interpretations of his results are offered, and it is argued that contextual interpretations, though attractive, focus unwarranted attention on unreplicable results. Using reliable and valid measures of personality, recent longitudinal findings support the more parsimonious interpretation that personality is stable in adulthood and that relations between personality and important outcomes hold over a wide variety of contexts.