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Personality Structure: Identifying Basic Dimensions of Human Traits

Personality Structure: Identifying Basic Dimensions of Human Traits. The lexical approach. The lexical hypothesis is generally defined by two postulates.

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Personality Structure: Identifying Basic Dimensions of Human Traits

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  1. Personality Structure: Identifying Basic Dimensions of Human Traits

  2. The lexical approach • The lexical hypothesis is generally defined by two postulates. • The first states that those personality characteristics that are most important in peoples' lives will eventually become a part of their language. • The second follows from the first, stating that more important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language as a single word. (Wikipedia) • Allport and Odbert (1936) searched the Webster's New International Dictionary for trait terms and eventually compiled a list of 4500 words that seemed to describe human traits.

  3. Raymond B. Cattell (1905-1998) • Changed his plans of becoming a chemist and enrolled in graduate study in psychology at the University of London • Worked with Charles Spearman, who taught him to use factor analysis • Came to the US to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia • Worked at Clark University until Allport invited him to join the faculty at Harvard

  4. Key concepts introduced by Cattell • The idea that factor analysis, which had previously been used to study different forms of intelligence, could be used to identify source traits • The notion that source traits are the fundamental dimensions of human personality • The development of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF): Warmth, Reasoning, Emotional Stability, Dominance, Liveliness, Rule-Consciousness, Social Boldness, Sensitivity, Vigilance, Abstractedness, Privateness, Apprehension, Openness to Change, Self-Reliance, Perfectionism, and Tension

  5. Historical identification of the Big Five personality dimensions

  6. The Big Five personality factors

  7. Criticisms and limitations of the Big Five model • There is some debate about what the five factors mean. • There is some disagreement about the number of personality factors that should be regarded as fundamental. • The set of trait terms from which the Big Five model was derived did not include evaluative ones, such as worthy or immoral. • There are small variations among the Big Five models proposed by different theorists that critics find troublesome but most Big Five theorists do not. • The Big Five model is often criticized for being atheoretical. However, the same criticism could have been applied to the periodic table of elements in chemistry, in the days before chemical processes were well understood.

  8. The NEO Personality Inventory Revised (NEO-PI-R) (Costa and McCrae, 1992b)

  9. The HEXACO Personality Inventory‒Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) (Lee and Ashton, 2006a)

  10. Sample items from the HEXACO-PI-R

  11. Application of the Big Five model in the workplace • Of the Big Five dimensions, conscientiousness is the best overall predictor of work performance across many different types of occupations. • Depending on the job description, other Big Five dimensions may also emerge as good predictors of performance: • Extraversion • Agreeableness • Openness to experience • Emotional stability

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