Key Takeaways
- Personality tests date back to the 18th century, when phrenology, measuring bumps on the skull, and physiognomy, analyzing a person’s outer appearance, were used to assess personality (Goldstein & Hershen, 2000).
- Beginning in the late 19th century, Sir Francis Galton, a British polymath (an expert in many fields) estimated the number of adjectives in the English dictionary that described personality. Louis Leon Thurstone eventually refined the list to 60 words, and through analyzing roughly 1,300 participants, the list was reduced again to seven common factors (Goldberg, 1993).
- Similarly, British-American psychologist Raymond Cattell developed a Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, a 185 multiple-choice self-report questionnaire used to measure personality in both clinical and non-clinical settings.
- In the 1980s, after an almost four-decade-long hiatus, Lewis Goldberg and colleagues (1980) revived Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal’s (1961) exploration of five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (commonly abbreviated as the acronym OCEAN).
- This new model significantly contributed to the wide acceptance and increased popularity the five-factor model received.
“Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristics behavior and thought” (Allport, 1961, p. 28).
“The characteristics or blend of characteristics that make a person unique” (Weinberg & Gould, 1999).
Both definitions emphasize the uniqueness of the individual and consequently adopt an idiographic view.
The idiographic view assumes that each person has a unique psychological structure and that some traits are possessed by only one person; and that there are times when it is impossible to compare one person with others.
It tends to use case studies for information gathering.
The nomothetic view, on the other hand, emphasizes comparability among individuals. This viewpoint sees traits as having the same psychological meaning in everyone.
This approach tends to use self-report personality questions, factor analysis, etc. People differ in their positions along a continuum in the same set of traits.
We must also consider the influence and interaction of nature (biology, genetics, etc.) and nurture (the environment, upbringing) with respect to personality development.
Trait theories of personality imply that personality is biologically based, whereas state theories, such as Bandura’s (1977) Social Learning Theory, emphasize the role of nurture and environmental influence.
Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic theory of personality assumes there is an interaction between nature (innate instincts) and nurture (parental influences).
Trait Approach to Personality
This approach assumes behavior is determined by relatively stable traits, the fundamental units of one’s personality.
Traits predispose one to act in a certain way, regardless of the situation. This