mod 2 - Identification of the Most Important Personality Traits Flashcards
three main approaches to identifying important personality traits
The Lexical Approach
The Statistical Approach
The Theoretical Approach
Describe the lexical hypothesis
all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language
Language provides an initial starting point for understanding personality. Think about how many words there are to describe how sociable or dominant someone is.
Identify and explain the two important criteria for identifying important traits using the lexical approach
- Synonym frequency: How many words are there to describe the same phenomenon?
- Cross-cultural universality: How many languages have words for similar terms
What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the lexical approach?
One problem with the lexical strategy concerns the fact that personality is conveyed through different parts of
speech, including adjectives, nouns, and adverbs.
22). The
lexical approach represents a good starting point for identifying important individual differences but should
not be used exclusively.
ex how does language inform our understanding of personality?
he words we use in popular song lyrics change over time. Researchers conducted a linguistic analysis of popular songs from 1980 to 2007 (DeWall et al., 2010). They found that the use of self-focused and anti-social words has increased and the use of other-focused, prosocial, and positive emotion words has decreased. These changes in word use reflect generational trends in people’s narcissistic and individualistic behaviour (Twenge & Foster, 2010).
How does the lexical approach turn into the statistical approach?
most researchers using the lexical approach turn to the statistical approach to distill ratings of trait adjectives into basic categories of traits
Describe the process taken to adopt the statistical approach.
○ Once a large and diverse pool of items has been assembled, the statistical approach is applied.
○ It consists of having a large number of people rate themselves (or others) on the items, then using a statistical procedure to identify groups or clusters of items.
○ The goal of the statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions, or
“coordinates,” of the personality map,
What is the most commonly used statistical procedure when adopting the statistical approach?
○ factor analysis. . Factor analysis essentially identifies groups of items that covary (i.e., go together) but tend
not to covary with other groups of items.
reduce a large number of diverse traits into smaller, related groups of traits. Items that correlate with one another tend to load on a similar factor.
explain what happens when people conduct a factor analysis.
factor loadings are found
Ex Let’s examine how factor analysis works in an example shown in Table 3.2. This table summarizes the data
obtained from a sample of 1,210 subjects who rated themselves on a series of trait-descriptive adjectives.
Among the adjectives rated were humorous, amusing, popular, hard-working, productive, determined, imagina-
tive, original, and inventive.
The numbers in Table 3.2 are called factor loadings, indexes of how much of the variation in an item is “ex-
plained” by the factor. Factor loadings indicate the degree to which the item correlates with, or “loads on,” the
underlying factor. In this example, three clear factors emerge. The first is an “extraversion” factor, with high load-
ings on humorous, amusing, and popular. The second is an “ambition” factor: hard-working, productive, and deter-
mined. The third is a “creativity” factor, with high loadings on imaginative, original, and inventive.
What are some of the advantages and disadvantages to the statistical approach?
major advantage of identifying clusters of personality items that covary is that it provides a means for determining which personality variables have some common property. Factor analysis can also be useful in reducing the large array of diverse personality traits into a smaller and more useful set of underlying factors.
○ It provides a means for organizing the thousands of personality traits.
○ A cautionary note should be made about using the statistical approach for identifying important traits: you get
out of it only what you put into it. If an important personality trait happens to be left out of a factor analysis,
it will not show up in the subsequent results.
Describe the theoretical approach.
The theoretical approach to identifying important dimensions of individual differences starts with a theory
that determines which variables are important.
How does the theoretical approach differ from the statistical approach?
In contrast to the statistical strategy, which can be described as atheoretical in the sense that there is no prejudgment about which variables are important, the theoretical
strategy dictates which variables are important to measure.
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