Identifying Important Traits Flashcards
What are the three fundamental approaches to identifying important traits?
o Lexical approach.
o Statistical approach.
o Theoretical approach.
What is the lexical hypothesis?
All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language.
What are the two criteria for identifying important traits in the lexical approach?
o Synonym frequency.
o Cross-cultural universality.
What is the goal of the statistical approach in trait identification?
To identify major dimensions or “coordinates” of the personality map, similar to how latitude and longitude provide coordinates on a map of Earth.
What is the starting point for the statistical approach to trait identification?
A pool of personality items that people rate themselves or others on, which are then analyzed to identify clusters of items that covary.
What is factor analysis, and why is it important in the statistical approach?
Factor analysis identifies groups of items that covary and reduces the large array of diverse personality traits into a smaller, more useful set of underlying factors.
How does the theoretical approach identify important dimensions of individual differences?
It starts with a theory that determines which variables are important to measure.
