Trait taxonomies and trait issues |  |
Chapter OutlineTraits and Trait Taxonomies
Introduction
- Trait-descriptive adjectives: Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are characteristic of a 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 that individuals differ?
- How can we formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits—a system that includes within it all the major traits of personality?
What Is a Trait: Two Basic Formulations
Traits as Internal Causal Properties
- Traits are presumed to be internal in that individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to next
- Desires and needs are presumed to be causal in that they explain behavior of individuals who possess them
- Traits can lie dormant in that capacities are present even when behaviors are not expressed
- Scientific usefulness of viewing traits as causes of behavior lies in ruling out other causes
Traits as Purely Descriptive Summaries
- Traits as descriptive summaries of attributes of a person; no assumption about internality, nor is causality assumed
- Argue that we must first identify and describe important individual differences and subsequently develop casual 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
- Act nominations: Designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories
- Prototypicality judgements: Involves identifying which acts are most central or prototypical of each trait category
- Monitoring act performance: Securing information on actual performance of individuals in their daily lives
- Critique of Act Frequency Formulation
- Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of the 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
- Atheoretical—nothing within approach provides guide to which traits are important or explanation for why individuals differ in frequency of act performance over time
- 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
Lexical Approach
- Starts with lexical hypothesis: All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language over time
- Trait terms are important for people in communicating with others
- Two criteria for identifying important traits
- Synonym frequency
- Cross-cultural universality
- Problems and limitations
- Many traits are ambiguous, metaphorical, obscure, or difficult
- Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech (not just adjectives), including nouns and adverbs
- Lexical approach is a good starting point for identifying important an individual difference, but should not be the exclusive approach used
Statistical Approach
- Starts with a large, diverse pool of personality items—e.g., trait words or series of questions about behavior, experience, and emotion
- Most researchers using lexical approach turn to statistical approach to distill ratings of trait adjectives into basic categories of traits
- Goal of statistical approach is to identify major dimensions of personality
- 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 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; thus, researchers must pay attention to the initial selection items
Theoretical Approach
- Starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important
- Example: Sociosexual orientation (Simpson & Gangestad, 1991)
- Strengths coincide with strengths of a theory, and weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of a theory
Evaluating the Approaches for Identifying Important Traits
- In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of three approaches
- Norman (1963) and Goldberg (1990) started with the lexical strategy to identify the first set of variables for inclusion
- Then used 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 describing order or structure that exists among individual differences identified
Taxonomies of Personality
Eysenck's Hierarchical Model of Personality
- Model of personality based on traits that Eysenck believed were highly heritable and had psychophysiological foundation
- Three traits met criteria: Extraversion-Introversion (E), Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N), Psychoticism (P)
- Extraversion: High scorers like parties, have many friends, require people around to talk to, like playing practical jokes on others, display carefree, easy manner, and have a high activity level
- Neuroticism: High scorers are worriers, anxious, depressed, have trouble sleeping, experience array of psychosomatic symptoms, and over-reactivity of negative emotions
- Psychoticism: High scorers are solitary, lack empathy, often cruel and inhumane, insensitivity to pain and suffering of others, aggressive, penchant for strange and unusual, impulsive, and has antisocial tendencies
- Hierarchical structure of Eysenck's System
- Super traits (P, E, N) at the top
- Narrower traits at the second level
- Subsumed by each narrower trait is the third level—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 increasingly precise nested system
- Biological underpinnings—key criteria for "basic" dimensions of personality
- Heritability: P, E, and N have moderate heritabilities, but so do many other personality traits
- Identifiable physiological substrate
- Extraversion is linked with the central nervous system reactivity
- Neuroticism is linked with the degree of lability of autonomic nervous system
- Psychoticism is linked with the testosterone levels and MAO levels, a neurotransmitter inhibitor
- Limitations
- Many other personality traits show moderate heritability
- Eysenck may have missed important traits
Cattell's Taxonomy: The 16 Personality Factor System
- Cattell's goal was to identify and measure the basic units of personality
- Believed that the true factors of personality should be found across different types of data, such as self-reports and laboratory tests
- Identified 16 factors
- Major criticisms
- Some personality researchers have failed to replicate the 16 factors
- Many argue that a smaller number of factors captures important ways in which individuals differ
Circumplex Taxonomies of Personality
- The Leary Circumplex (1957)
- Two-dimensional representation of personality organized around two major axes
- Power axis, anchored by dominance and submission
- Love axis, anchored by love and hate
- All other personality traits are blends of two primary dimensions
- According to Leary, elements within the circumplex represented a continuum, with healthy adjustment depicted close to the inner circle and maladjustment toward the outside of circle
- Leary circumplex served three functions for depicting traits:
- Provided a circular map of interpersonal terrain—traits relevant to social interaction
- Specified relations between each variable within the system—variables close to each other on the circle are positively related
- Provided a model for adjustment and healthy, unhealthy expressions of each trait
- The Wiggins Circumplex (1979)
- Wiggins developed measurement scales to assess traits represented in the Leary circumplex
- 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
- Wiggins was concerned with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these out
- Defined "interpersonal" as interactions between people involving exchanges
- Two resources that define social exchange are love and status
- Dimensions of status and love define axes of Wiggins circumplex
- Compared to the Leary circumplex, 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, orthogonality)
- Alerts investigators to "gaps" in work on interpersonal behavior
- Key limitation: Interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions—other traits may have important interpersonal consequences
Five Factor Model
- Five broad factors: Surgency or Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness/Intellect
- Originally based on the combination of lexical and statistical approaches
- Big Five taxonomy has achieved a greater degree of consensus than any other trait taxonomy in the history of personality trait psychology
- Empirical evidence for five-factor model of personality
- Replicable in studies using English language trait words as items
- Found by more than a dozen researchers using different samples
- Replicated in every decade for the past half century, suggesting five- factor solution replicable over time
- Replicated in different languages
- Replicated using different item formats
- The troublesome fifth factor: Some disagreement remains about the content and replicability of fifth factor
Is the five-factor model comprehensive? Possible omissions include positive evaluation, negative evaluation, masculinity/femininity, religiosity or spirituality, attractiveness, sexuality
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education