In this video I describe several approaches to narrowing down personality traits into a manageable number of ways of thinking about how people differ. These include Gordon Allport‘s hierarchy of cardinal dispositions, central traits, and secondary traits, the use of factor analysis and Raymond Cattell’s 16PF test for source traits, and Hans Eysenck’s two (and later three) dimensional model of Introversion/Extraversion and Neuroticism (and later Psychoticism).
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re gonna consider how we determine which traits to assess when thinking about personality. So in the 1930s Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert looked through dictionaries and they pulled out all of the terms that they thought could refer to personality and, based on this, they came up with a list of over 18,000 words that could be used to describe someone’s personality.
Now within these 18,000 of course there were many synonyms and lots of overlap but one thing that Allport proposed, and here’s a picture of Allport here, was that we can think about traits as being in a hierarchy in terms of how much they influence a person’s personality. So he thought we could have cardinal dispositions, and these were traits that influenced almost everything a person does, and then we have central traits, and those influence a large number of thoughts and behaviors. And then lastly, we would have secondary traits and these influence only a few thoughts and behaviors.
Now, we have to be careful when thinking about determining the importance of a trait because we might be influenced by other factors. In other words, we might think that a trait is more important than it is and this brings us to the 1940s, when researchers were interested in a trait they called authoritarianism. And this was because of the rise of fascism. So they thought there might be a personality trait that could explain this and so we had this idea of authoritarianism; which referred to a tendency towards obedience, conformity, and political conservatism. The problem is that over time interest in authoritarianism as a trait waned and so this shows us we have to be careful that we might think a trait is important at a particular time but later maybe it turns out it isn’t that important or it’s not the best way to explain something.
So how do we determine which traits really matter? Well, one way we can do that is we don’t decide. We let the statistics decide. In other words, instead of trying to guess which traits are most important, we simply measure as many traits as we can and then we look for correlations between those traits. And that’s going to tell us what actually matters, what’s the most important. This is a technique we saw already when discussing intelligence called factor analysis. So in the case of intelligence we looked at many different skills and then we tried to pull out common factors from those skills and we got something like g for general intelligence. So how would that look for a personality? Well, the idea is that we look for many items that we’ve assessed, so a large number of traits, and then we see if we can come up with a single label that refers to many correlated items. So a factor would be the label that we have for referring to many things that are correlated.
So what does that actually look like well? Let’s say in the case of personality we went out and measured a bunch of items we have a bunch of traits here and we find that people who score highly on kindness also score highly on compassion. And they also score highly on loyalty. And they don’t score highly on rudeness, but they also score highly on empathy. So we might look at this list and say there’s something that these things have in common. There’s something about kindness, compassion, loyalty, and empathy that sort of goes together. And if we then did some statistical analysis of people’s scores we might find that all of these scores are correlated. So what that means is that we might be able to come up with a single factor that actually explains all of these. And so then we would come up with a label for this and in this case we might say that we could use the label agreeableness.
Now people will disagree about exactly what the label should be because it might have some connotations. They don’t agree with for certain terms but that’s a little bit more complicated. The idea is we come up with a single label and we say from now on “agreeableness” is going to refer to all of these other things because we found correlations between all these things; kindness, compassion, loyalty, empathy. Those are all correlated with one another for lots of people who take these assessments and so we’re just going to call that agreeableness. We can say somebody is high in agreeableness; it means that they’re high in all of these things. Ok, so that’s the way that we would use factor analysis to look at personality.
Now, the next question you might have is how many of these factors should we be trying to pull out from our data, you know? Like how much can we group things together? Are we going to have just a few factors? Or maybe we’re gonna find many factors, I mean, after all we had 18,000 words before, so how many factors can we narrow that down to? Well, one approach from Raymond Cattell, who we learned about in intelligence, and here’s a picture of Cattell here, for proposing the distinction between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence, and that was based on factor analysis. Cattell applied factor analysis to personality and he created the 16PF test and this refers to sixteen personality factors. His idea for these were that these were the source traits; these were the most important factors for explaining personality. And his list included intelligence and we might think that sixteen is still kind of a lot to think about it once, you know? Each person having sixteen different factors that we’re considering, maybe that’s too many. Maybe we can narrow it down even further. Maybe some of those factors are actually correlated with one another.
And so at the other extreme we could think of the work of Hans Eysenck, and here’s a picture of Eysenck here, and Eysenck initially proposed just two dimensions for thinking about personality. He boiled everything down to saying that, well you have a level of introversion or extroversion, and then you also have a level of neuroticism. And neuroticism refers to your level of emotional stability or emotional instability. He thought these two dimensions could explain a lot of the differences in people’s personalities.
So we could think of a chart here where we say, okay you have some level of introversion or extroversion, and then you have some level of neuroticism, low neuroticism or high neuroticism, and so the idea is we could pick somebody who, let’s say they’re highly neurotic, right? They’re very emotionally unstable but if they’re also extroverted then maybe that neuroticism is going to show itself in terms of aggression; they’re going to be aggressive towards others. But if they’re really introverted and they’re withdrawn then maybe they’re just going to come across as being very moody, right? They’re there, they’re at the same level of neuroticism but they’re expressing it differently because of this other dimension.
Now Eysenck did later add a third dimension. He thought maybe two wasn’t actually quite enough and he added a dimension called psychoticism, and that refers to somebody’s lack of empathy, level of hostility, and impulsiveness. But even just this two-factor model, we can see can explain a lot of differences between people. And we can also liken it to Galen’s four personality types based on humors, right? Because we can see that each of these four quadrants here would match up with those terms like sanguine, choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic.
But we might think two or even three is not quite enough to describe all of the nuances in terms of differences between people’s personalities. So in the next video we’ll look at another model which is the Five Factor Model which looks at five factors for explaining personality. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
