TRAITS
Psychological traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are di erent from each
other. Traits are formally conceptualized and measured by psychologists in two di erent
approaches: as dimensions on which people di er (some people are high, low and others are in
the middle) or in a categorial approach (limited number of personality types). Personality research
has consistently shown that traits indeed exist as dimensions, not types, distributed normally over
a range of expressions. There are two ways in which personality psychologists view these traits:
• Internal causal properties = individuals carry their desires, needs and wants from one
situation to the next. These are considered to be causal because they explain the behavior of
the individuals who possess them. The internal desires in uence the external behavior.
Psychologists who view traits this way do not equate traits with the external behavior that
people perform. Traits can lie inactive in the sense that the capacities remain present even
when particular behaviors are not actually expressed. Traits are presumed to exist, even in the
absence of observable behavioral expressions. This view does rule out other potential reasons
for an individual’s behavior.
• Purely descriptive summaries = traits are de ned as descriptive summaries of attributes of
persons; there are no assumptions about internality or causality. The cause of someone’s
behavior is not prejudged; behavior can be caused by multiple factors such as social situations.
We must rst identify and describe the important individual di erences among people, then
subsequently develop causal theories to explain them.
Behaviors change overtime. This is called personality coherence; the precise behavioral
manifestations of a trait change with age. The overall level of dominant acts will remain the same
throughout life. Personality coherence thus includes continuity in the underlying trait but change in
the outward manifestation of that trait. There is a clear di erence between traits and states. Traits
are represent the typical behavior of a person over prolonged periods of time, while states vary
across time and situations and can therefore be regarded as within-subject variations of behavior.
Emotions are prototypical examples of states.
Psychologists who use the descriptive formulation of traits have explored the implications of this
formulation in the act frequency approach. This approach starts with the notion that traits are
categories of acts (a dominant person is someone who performs a large number of dominant acts
relative to others) in the act frequency formulation, a trait is a descriptive summary of the general
trend in a person’s behavior. This approach involves three key elements:
• Act nomination = a procedure designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories.
Researchers can identify hundreds of acts belonging to various trait categories.
• Prototypicality judgement = identifying which acts are most central to (prototypical of) each
trait category.
• Recording of act performance = securing information on the actual performance of
individuals in their daily lives, usually obtained by self-reports or reports from close ones.
This approach has been criticized on several grounds. Firstly aimed at the technical application of
the approach; it is not clear how much context is needed to identify a certain act. Secondly, it
doesn’t include failures to act and covert acts that are not directly observable. Despite these
limitations, the approach has been especially helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena
to which most trait terms refer. It is also helpful in identifying behavioral regularities, in exploring
the meaning of some traits that have proven di cult to study, and in identifying cultural similarities
and di erences in the behavioral manifestation of traits. Research has shown that the more
observable the actions, the higher the agreement between self-report and observer codings. The
act frequency approach can be used to predict important outcomes in everyday life.
IDENTIFICATION OF IMPORTANT TRAITS
In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of the following three strategies:
• Lexical approach = starts with the lexical hypothesis: all important individual di erences have
become encoded within the natural language. People invent words, trait terms, such as
dominant and self-centered, to describe people and to communicate information about them.
Unuseful trait terms will fail to become encoded within the natural language. One problem with
the lexical approach is that personality is conveyed through di erent parts of speech, including
adjectives, nouns and adverbs. However, it provides a good starting point for identifying
important individual di erences but should not be used exclusively. There are two criteria for
identifying important traits:
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, ➡Synonym frequency = the more synonyms an attribute has, the more important the trait is.
➡Cross-cultural universality = the more languages that have a term for a certain trait, the
more important that individual di erence is. If a trait exists only in one or a few languages, it
may be of only local relevance.
• Statistical approach = starts with a pool of personality items. Once a large and diverse pool
has been assembled, the statistical approach is applied. A large number of people rate
themselves or others on the items, then using a statistical procedure to identify groups or
clusters of items. The goal is to identify the major dimensions of the personality
map. The most commonly used statistical procedure is factor analysis, which
essentially identi es groups of items that go together but tend to not go together
with other groups of items. This creates several clusters of correlated items. This
provides a means for determining which personality variables have some
common property.
➡Correlations are shown with factor loadings; indexes of how much the
variation in an item is ‘explained’ by the factor. These indicate the degree to which the item
correlates with the underlying factor.
• Theoretical approach = starts with a theory that determines which variables are important.
The strengths of this approach correspond with the strengths of the theory, and the
weaknesses correspond with the weaknesses of the theory.
EYSENCK = HIERARCHICAL MODEL OF PERSONALITY
Eysenck developed a model pf personality based on traits that he believed were
highly heritable and had a likely psychophysiological foundation. The three main traits
that met these criteria were extraversion-introversion(E), neuroticism-emotional
stability (N), and psychoticism (P). Together these traits are called PEN. These traits
all contain a large number of narrow traits, which all go together su ciently to each
other to load on the same large factor; every large trait is at the top of its own
hierarchy.
• High E-score > many friends, like having people around, jokes, high activity level,
carefree
• Low E-score > alone, quiet time, calm activities, little friends, more serious,
organized
• High N-score > worrier, sleeping problems, psychosomatic symptoms, depression
and anxiety, overreactivity to negative emotions, bigger arousal to stress
• Low N-score > emotionally stable, calm, slower to react to stressful events
• High P-score > solitary, insensitivity to pain of others, aggressive, strong inclination for strange
and unusual things, antisocial tendencies, hostile sexual attitudes, dangerous activities
• Low P-score > more religious, calm
These labels, especially P, have generated controversy, as well as the inclusion of creativity as a
narrow trait within P. However, P has emerged as an important trait in normal-range personality
research.
Eysenck’s model is built in the following way: super-traits at the top, narrow traits at the second
level, habitual acts at the third level and speci c acts at the fourth and lowest level. Habitual acts
are speci c acts that are performed regularly. If enough speci c acts are repeated frequently, they
become habitual acts at the third level, clusters of habitual acts become narrow traits, and
clusters of narrow traits become super-traits at the top of the hierarchy. There are two critical
biological aspects of Eysenck’s system: heritability and identi able physiological substrate. A key
criterion for a basic dimension of personality is that it has reasonably high heritability (PEN have
moderate heritabilities). Another criterion is that basic personality traits should have an identi able
physiological substrate; that one can identify properties in the brain and central nervous system
that are presumed to be part of the causal chain that produces personality traits.
Criticism: many other personality traits also show moderate heritability, Eysenck may have missed
some important traits in his taxonomy.
CATTELL = 16 FACTOR PERSONALITY SYSTEM
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Psychological traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are di erent from each
other. Traits are formally conceptualized and measured by psychologists in two di erent
approaches: as dimensions on which people di er (some people are high, low and others are in
the middle) or in a categorial approach (limited number of personality types). Personality research
has consistently shown that traits indeed exist as dimensions, not types, distributed normally over
a range of expressions. There are two ways in which personality psychologists view these traits:
• Internal causal properties = individuals carry their desires, needs and wants from one
situation to the next. These are considered to be causal because they explain the behavior of
the individuals who possess them. The internal desires in uence the external behavior.
Psychologists who view traits this way do not equate traits with the external behavior that
people perform. Traits can lie inactive in the sense that the capacities remain present even
when particular behaviors are not actually expressed. Traits are presumed to exist, even in the
absence of observable behavioral expressions. This view does rule out other potential reasons
for an individual’s behavior.
• Purely descriptive summaries = traits are de ned as descriptive summaries of attributes of
persons; there are no assumptions about internality or causality. The cause of someone’s
behavior is not prejudged; behavior can be caused by multiple factors such as social situations.
We must rst identify and describe the important individual di erences among people, then
subsequently develop causal theories to explain them.
Behaviors change overtime. This is called personality coherence; the precise behavioral
manifestations of a trait change with age. The overall level of dominant acts will remain the same
throughout life. Personality coherence thus includes continuity in the underlying trait but change in
the outward manifestation of that trait. There is a clear di erence between traits and states. Traits
are represent the typical behavior of a person over prolonged periods of time, while states vary
across time and situations and can therefore be regarded as within-subject variations of behavior.
Emotions are prototypical examples of states.
Psychologists who use the descriptive formulation of traits have explored the implications of this
formulation in the act frequency approach. This approach starts with the notion that traits are
categories of acts (a dominant person is someone who performs a large number of dominant acts
relative to others) in the act frequency formulation, a trait is a descriptive summary of the general
trend in a person’s behavior. This approach involves three key elements:
• Act nomination = a procedure designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories.
Researchers can identify hundreds of acts belonging to various trait categories.
• Prototypicality judgement = identifying which acts are most central to (prototypical of) each
trait category.
• Recording of act performance = securing information on the actual performance of
individuals in their daily lives, usually obtained by self-reports or reports from close ones.
This approach has been criticized on several grounds. Firstly aimed at the technical application of
the approach; it is not clear how much context is needed to identify a certain act. Secondly, it
doesn’t include failures to act and covert acts that are not directly observable. Despite these
limitations, the approach has been especially helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena
to which most trait terms refer. It is also helpful in identifying behavioral regularities, in exploring
the meaning of some traits that have proven di cult to study, and in identifying cultural similarities
and di erences in the behavioral manifestation of traits. Research has shown that the more
observable the actions, the higher the agreement between self-report and observer codings. The
act frequency approach can be used to predict important outcomes in everyday life.
IDENTIFICATION OF IMPORTANT TRAITS
In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of the following three strategies:
• Lexical approach = starts with the lexical hypothesis: all important individual di erences have
become encoded within the natural language. People invent words, trait terms, such as
dominant and self-centered, to describe people and to communicate information about them.
Unuseful trait terms will fail to become encoded within the natural language. One problem with
the lexical approach is that personality is conveyed through di erent parts of speech, including
adjectives, nouns and adverbs. However, it provides a good starting point for identifying
important individual di erences but should not be used exclusively. There are two criteria for
identifying important traits:
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ff fffl ffff ffffff
, ➡Synonym frequency = the more synonyms an attribute has, the more important the trait is.
➡Cross-cultural universality = the more languages that have a term for a certain trait, the
more important that individual di erence is. If a trait exists only in one or a few languages, it
may be of only local relevance.
• Statistical approach = starts with a pool of personality items. Once a large and diverse pool
has been assembled, the statistical approach is applied. A large number of people rate
themselves or others on the items, then using a statistical procedure to identify groups or
clusters of items. The goal is to identify the major dimensions of the personality
map. The most commonly used statistical procedure is factor analysis, which
essentially identi es groups of items that go together but tend to not go together
with other groups of items. This creates several clusters of correlated items. This
provides a means for determining which personality variables have some
common property.
➡Correlations are shown with factor loadings; indexes of how much the
variation in an item is ‘explained’ by the factor. These indicate the degree to which the item
correlates with the underlying factor.
• Theoretical approach = starts with a theory that determines which variables are important.
The strengths of this approach correspond with the strengths of the theory, and the
weaknesses correspond with the weaknesses of the theory.
EYSENCK = HIERARCHICAL MODEL OF PERSONALITY
Eysenck developed a model pf personality based on traits that he believed were
highly heritable and had a likely psychophysiological foundation. The three main traits
that met these criteria were extraversion-introversion(E), neuroticism-emotional
stability (N), and psychoticism (P). Together these traits are called PEN. These traits
all contain a large number of narrow traits, which all go together su ciently to each
other to load on the same large factor; every large trait is at the top of its own
hierarchy.
• High E-score > many friends, like having people around, jokes, high activity level,
carefree
• Low E-score > alone, quiet time, calm activities, little friends, more serious,
organized
• High N-score > worrier, sleeping problems, psychosomatic symptoms, depression
and anxiety, overreactivity to negative emotions, bigger arousal to stress
• Low N-score > emotionally stable, calm, slower to react to stressful events
• High P-score > solitary, insensitivity to pain of others, aggressive, strong inclination for strange
and unusual things, antisocial tendencies, hostile sexual attitudes, dangerous activities
• Low P-score > more religious, calm
These labels, especially P, have generated controversy, as well as the inclusion of creativity as a
narrow trait within P. However, P has emerged as an important trait in normal-range personality
research.
Eysenck’s model is built in the following way: super-traits at the top, narrow traits at the second
level, habitual acts at the third level and speci c acts at the fourth and lowest level. Habitual acts
are speci c acts that are performed regularly. If enough speci c acts are repeated frequently, they
become habitual acts at the third level, clusters of habitual acts become narrow traits, and
clusters of narrow traits become super-traits at the top of the hierarchy. There are two critical
biological aspects of Eysenck’s system: heritability and identi able physiological substrate. A key
criterion for a basic dimension of personality is that it has reasonably high heritability (PEN have
moderate heritabilities). Another criterion is that basic personality traits should have an identi able
physiological substrate; that one can identify properties in the brain and central nervous system
that are presumed to be part of the causal chain that produces personality traits.
Criticism: many other personality traits also show moderate heritability, Eysenck may have missed
some important traits in his taxonomy.
CATTELL = 16 FACTOR PERSONALITY SYSTEM
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