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Chapter 3

Traits and Trait Taxonomies

Trait-Descriptive Adjectives Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the person and perhaps enduring over time.

Three Fundamental Questions Guide Those Who Study Traits

• How should we conceptualize traits? • How can we identify which traits are the most important

from among the many ways in which individuals differ? • How can we formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits

—a system that includes within it all the major traits of personality?

Definitions of Trait: Basic Formulations

• Traits as internal causal properties. • Traits as purely descriptive summaries.

Traits as Internal Causal Properties

Traits are presumed to be internal. Individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to next. • Desires and needs are presumed to be causal in the sense

that they explain the behavior of the individuals who possess them.

Traits can lie dormant. • Capacities are present even when behaviors are not

expressed.

The scientific usefulness of viewing traits as causes of behavior lies in ruling out other causes.

Traits as Purely Descriptive Summaries

Traits are descriptive summaries of attributes of a person. • No assumption about internality or is causality is made.

Personality psychologists argue that we must first identify and describe important individual differences and subsequently develop causal theories to explain them.

The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits: An Illustration of the Descriptive Summary Formulation

Starts with the notion that traits are categories of acts.

Act Frequency Research Program The act frequency approach to traits involves three key elements: act nomination, prototypicality judgment, and the recording of act performance. Act nominations. • Identifying which acts belong in which trait categories.

Prototypicality judgments. • Identifying which acts are most central to, or prototypical of,

each trait category.

Recording act performance. • Securing information on actual performance of individuals

in their daily lives.

Critique for Act Frequency Formulation

Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of a trait-relevant act. Seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act or covert acts not directly observable? • May not successfully capture complex traits.

Accomplishments of Act Frequency Formulation

• Helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena to which most trait terms refer.

• Helpful in identifying behavioral regularities. • Helpful in exploring the meaning of some traits that are

difficult to study, such as impulsivity and creativity.

Identification of the Most Important Traits: Three Approaches

• Lexical approach. • Statistical approach. • Theoretical approach.

Lexical Approach 1

Lexical hypothesis: All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Trait terms are helpful in describing people and for communicating information about them. • Two criteria for identifying important traits. • Synonym frequency. • Cross-cultural universality.

Lexical Approach 2

Limitation. • Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech,

including adjectives, nouns, and adverbs. • Lexical approach is a good starting point for identifying

important individual differences but should not be the only approach used.

Statistical Approach 1

• Starts with a large, diverse pool of personality items. • Most researchers using the lexical approach turn to the

statistical approach to distill self-ratings of trait adjectives into basic categories of personality traits.

• Goal of statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions of personality.

Statistical Approach 2

Factor analysis. Identifies groups of items that covary, or go together, but tend not to covary with other groups of items. Provides means for determining which personality variables share some common property or belong within the same group. Useful in reducing the large array of diverse traits into smaller, more useful set of underlying factors. Factor loading: Index of how much of a variation in an item is “explained” by a factor. • Cautionary note: You only get out of factor analysis what you put

in. • Researchers must pay attention till the initial selection items.

Theoretical Approach Starts with a theory that determines which variables are important. Example: Sociosexual orientation theory (Simpson & Gangestad, 19 91; Penke & Asendorph, 2008a). Evaluation. • Strengths coincide with strengths of the theory, and

weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the theory. • To the extent that the theory contains gaps or biases, the

subsequent identification of important individual differences will reflect omissions and distortions.

Evaluating the Approaches for Identifying Important Traits

In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of the three approaches. Norman (19 63), Goldberg (19 90), and Saucier (2009) started with the lexical strategy to identify the first set of variables for inclusion. Applied factor analysis to reduce the set to a more manageable number (five). This strategy solves two problems central to the science of personality. • Problem of identifying key domains of individual differences. • Problem of figuring out a method for describing structure that

exists among the individual differences identified.

Taxonomies of Personality • Eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality. • Circumplex taxonomies of personality: The Wiggins

circumplex (19 79). • Five-factor model.

Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 1

Model of personality based on traits that Eysenck believed were highly heritable and had psychophysiological foundation. Three traits that meet the criteria. • Extraversion-introversion (E). • Neuroticism-emotional stability (N). • Psychoticism (P).

Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 2

Extraversion. High scorers are people who enjoy parties. • Have many friends. • Like to have people around to talk to. • Like playing practical jokes on others. • Display carefree and easy manner. • Have a high activity level.

Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 3

Neuroticism. High scorers are worriers. • Usually anxious and depressed. • Have trouble sleeping, experience array of psychosomatic

symptoms, and overreact to negative emotions.

Psychoticism. High scorers are solitary individuals. • Lack empathy and are often cruel and inhumane. • Have a penchant for the strange and unusual. • Impulsive and have antisocial tendencies.

Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 4

Hierarchical structure of Eysenck’s system. Super traits (P, E, and N) are at the top. Narrower traits are placed in the second level. Subsumed by each narrow trait is the third level. • Contain habitual acts.

At the lowest level of the four-tiered hierarchy are specific acts. Hierarchy has the advantage of locating each specific personality-relevant act within an increasingly precise nested system.

Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 5

Biological underpinnings. Key criteria for “basic” dimensions of personality is that it has reasonably high heritability. • P, E, and N have moderate heritabilities but so do many

other personality traits.

Psychological traits should have identifiable physiological substrate.

Limitations. • Many other personality traits show moderate heritability. • Eysenck may have missed important traits.

The Wiggins Circumplex 1

Wiggins (19 79). • Developed measurement scales to assess traits. • Started with the lexical assumption. • Argued that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in

which individuals differ: Interpersonal, temperament, character, material, attitude, mental, and physical traits.

The Wiggins Circumplex 2

Wiggins was concerned with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these out. Defined “interpersonal” as interactions among people involving exchanges. • Two resources that define social exchange are love and

status. • Dimensions of status and love define axes of the Wiggins

circumplex.

Figure 3.2: The Circumplex Model of Personality

Source: Adapted from “Circular Reasoning About Interpersonal Behavior,” by J. S. Wiggins, N. Phillips, and P. Trapnell, 19 89, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 56, p. 297. Copyright 19 89 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Access the text alternative for slide images.

The Wiggins Circumplex 3

Wiggins circumplex has three key advantages. • Provides an explicit definition of what constitutes “interpersonal”

behavior. • Specifies relationships between each trait and every other trait

in the model (adjacency, bipolarity, and orthogonality). • Alerts investigators to “gaps” in investigations of interpersonal

behavior.

Key limitation. Interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions. • Other traits, not captured by these two dimensions, also

have important interpersonal consequences.

Five-Factor Model 1

Five broad factors. • Surgency or extraversion. • Agreeableness. • Conscientiousness. • Emotional stability. • Openness-intellect.

Originally based on a combination of lexical and statistical approaches. Achieved a greater degree of consensus than any other trait taxonomy in the history of personality trait psychology.

Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 1

Extraversion or surgency • Talkative–silent. • Sociable–reclusive. • Adventurous–cautious. • Open–secretive.

Agreeableness • Good-natured–irritable. • Cooperative–negativistic. • Mild/gentle–headstrong. • Not jealous–jealous.

Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 2

Conscientiousness • Responsible–undependable. • Scrupulous–unscrupulous. • Persevering–quitting. • Fussy/tidy–careless.

Emotional stability • Calm–anxious. • Composed–excitable. • Not hypochondriacal–

hypochondriacal. • Poised–nervous/tense.

Culture—Intellect, Openness • Intellectual–unreflective/

narrow. • Artistic–non-artistic. • Imaginative–simple/direct. • Polished/refined–crude/

boorish.

Five-Factor Model 2

Empirical evidence for the five-factor model. • Replicable in studies using English-language trait words as

items. • Found by more than a dozen researchers using different

samples. • Replicated in different languages. • Replicated in every decade for the past half-century, suggesting

that five-factor solution is replicable over time. • Replicated using different item formats.

The troublesome fifth factor. Some disagreement remains about the content and replicability of the fifth factor.

Five-Factor Model 3

Is the five-factor model comprehensive? Possible omissions. • Positive evaluation. • Negative evaluation. • Religiosity and spirituality. • Attractiveness. • Sexuality.

The HEXACO Model 1

Some argue that the most comprehensive cross-language taxonomy of personality is best captured by the HEXACO model. • Humility–Honesty (H). • Emotionality (E). • Extraversion (X). • Agreeableness (A). • Conscientiousness (C). • Openness to Experience (O).

The HEXACO Model 2

Five of the six factors are very close to those of the Big Five, although there are subtle differences. Six-factor taxonomy has emerged in lexical-based studies of the major world languages. The Honesty–Humility factor has accrued strong construct validity. • High scorers are more likely to offer sincere and humble

apologies (Dunlop et al., 2015), even though they are less likely to violate social rules.

• Those high on Honesty–Humility are more likely to be sincerely religious.

The HEXACO Model 3

Those low on Honesty–Humility tend to be interpersonally exploitative, are more likely to sabotage others in their work environment, and are even more likely to engage in criminal activity.

Evaluation: • HEXACO Model is being validated in many different

cultures. • Evidence continues to accumulate that Honesty–Humility is

not well captured by the five-factor model.

Summary and Evaluation • There are different approaches to identifying important

traits. • Personality psychologists sometimes use a blend of

approaches. • Formulating an overarching taxonomy of personality traits

is fundamental.

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End of Main Content

Chapter 3
Trait-Descriptive Adjectives
Three Fundamental Questions Guide Those Who Study Traits
Definitions of Trait: Basic Formulations
Traits as Internal Causal Properties
Traits as Purely Descriptive Summaries
The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits: An Illustration of the
Act Frequency Research Program
Critique for Act Frequency Formulation
Accomplishments of Act Frequency Formulation
Identification of the Most Important Traits: Three Approaches
Lexical Approach 1
Lexical Approach 2
Statistical Approach 1
Statistical Approach 2
Theoretical Approach
Evaluating the Approaches for Identifying Important Traits
Taxonomies of Personality
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 1
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 2
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 3
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 4
Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 5
The Wiggins Circumplex 1
The Wiggins Circumplex 2
Figure 3.2: The Circumplex Model of Personality
The Wiggins Circumplex 3
Five-Factor Model 1
Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 1
Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 2
Five-Factor Model 2
Five-Factor Model 3
The HEXACO Model 1
The HEXACO Model 2
The HEXACO Model 3
Summary and Evaluation
End of Main Content