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We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of predictive models without being constrained by parsimony and intuitiveness but instead maximizing out–of–sample predictive accuracy. We argue that naturally occurring variance in many decontextualized and multidetermined constructs that interest personality scientists may not have individual causes, at least as this term is generally understood and in ways that are human–interpretable, never mind intervenable. If so, useful explanations are narratives that summarize many pieces of descriptive findings rather than models that target individual cause–effect …