Personality Traits Personality Traits · 'coherent patterning over time and space of affect, behaviour, cognition and desire' - Bill Revelle Problems with 'personality traits' . There is an inability to characterise and organise personality traits due to the breadth of thousands of personality relevant terms - Allport & Odbert (1936) . Allport listed over 1000 words from the dictionary which were used to describe the personality Jingle/Jangle Fallacies · Jingle Fallacy - assuming that two different things are the same because they have the same name . Jangle Fallacy - assuming that two identical things are different because they are labelled differently Dark Ages of Personality · 1920s - 80s - Researchers used any number of different scales and measures to study p. traits - No common language available - Slide 10 image displays the plethora of scales available to describe personality, cannot compare across different studies due to the use of different measures Raymond Cattell · Introduced Factor Analytic Approach - Subset of Allport & Odbert's personality terms, condensed Allports words into a smaller number which was labelled independently - Reported 12 factors (later modified to form 16p. factors) Significance - used only 35 terms / issues regarding the actual findings, errors in the calculations but pushed the field in the terms of personality being condensed and explained in a smaller subset Emergence of 'Big Five' · Tupes & Christal (1961) - Analysed correlation matrices from 8 samples of personality measures, found 5 relatively strong and recurrent factors and nothing more of any consequence · Replicated soon after by Norman (1963) & Borgatta (1964) Lewis Goldberg (1981) · 'Big Five' put a name to the structure · 'Big' denotes breadth, not greatness · Factors allow for an understanding of what an individual is like as a person
Five Factor Model · Costa & McCrae (1992) - Broke the lexical tradition - Argued that statements can better access the components of personality critical to study - Endorses explanation, not just description 3 Factor vs 5 Factor · Eysenck - PEN model, psychoticism/extraversion/neuroticism, key advocate for empirically led psychotherapy, psychoticism encompassed the other words from the big 5 · Eysencks work was most published from 80s - 90s, post 1995 the 5 factor model grew in population HEXACO: Ashton & Lee (2001) · Honesty-Humility · Emotionality · extraversion · Agreeableness (broken into this and Honesty) · Conscientiousness · Openness · Argued 6 factors better represent the personality, evidence from cross culture research and place emphasis on evolutionary approach 3 vs 5 vs 6 Summary · Eysenck's not valued, lost the debate · HEXACO = useful revision to the big 5 . Difficulty determining truth, may reflect the use of factor analysis and multiple methods needed Big Five: OCEAN · Neuroticism · Extraversion · Openness · Agreeableness · Conscientiousness Measurement Hierarchy · Break things down into meaningful ways · Big 5 can be broken down into further aspects and facets Meta Traits · Traits which live above the big 5 - Plasticity