Trait Theories
Gordon Allport is one of the most significant trait theorists. He studied an unabridged English dictionary and identified 18, 000 adjectives that can be used in describing people. He then shortened this list to 4, 500 words then classified them into 200 clusters. Allport emphasized that these traits, a person’s tendency and predisposition to behave in a certain way, are the building blocks of personality. Raymond Cattell, another trait theorist, used a statistical technique called “factor analysis” to further shorten Allport’s list. Cattell was a chemistry major back then and he was interested to discover the basic units of personality, similar to the basic periodic table of elements in chemistry. He identified groups of items that can correlate with other items. As a result, Cattell extracted sixteen distinct units of personality traits he called as “source units”. According to Cattell, what makes all persons unique from one another is that each person has a distinct combination of traits that can be summarized through a “personality profile”. This personality profile is the “Sixteen Personality Factors Questionnaire” or 16 PF, a 187-item assessment devised by Cattell.
Cattell’s model was even more simplified to identify five major factors that emerged from personal ratings, external ratings, and personality questionnaires. The model enumerating the five major factors became known as the “five-factor model” or “the Big Five”. This model has been consistently used in studies of children, college students, adults, in both sexes, and in different languages around the world. The five major personality factors identified were neuroticism (a high tendency for anxiety and negative affect), extraversion (social orientation), openness (receptiveness for new experiences, ideas and concepts), agreeableness (concern for others), and conscientiousness (reliability, self-discipline and ambition). Despite disagreements that the five factors are too few or are too many, this model has been used to construct psychometric tests and assessments.