Trait Theory (L6) Flashcards
What is a trait?
A building block of personality, consistent, distinctive, and stable patterns in thinking, feeling, and behaving
Traits exist on a continuum from low to high and are important if they are described by many words across cultures.
How did trait theory develop?
From Allport’s 4000 words describing personality from the dictionary
This marked the beginning of systematic personality assessment.
What are traits not?
Types, states, activities
Examples: Traits - stable disposition; State - angry; Activity - ranting.
What is the lexical hypothesis?
The idea that important personality traits are encoded in language
Proposed by Allport and Odbert in 1936, who categorized words used to describe people.
What are the main western essentialist trait models?
Allport’s 4,504 words, Cattell’s 16 groups of traits, Eysenck’s 3 factor theory (PEN)
Eysenck’s factors: Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism.
What did Cattell use to develop his trait theory?
Factor analysis, a statistical procedure based on correlation
This method identified items reflective of underlying dimensions.
What are the three factors in Eysenck’s theory?
Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism
Psychoticism includes traits like aggressive; Extraversion includes sociable; Neuroticism includes anxious.
Fill in the blank: Traits are ______, distinctive, and stable patterns in the way individuals think, feel, and behave.
consistent
True or False: Traits exist on a fixed scale.
False
Traits are continuous, ranging from low to high.
Who proposed the lexical hypothesis?
Allport and Odbert
They explored the dictionary to categorize personality descriptors.
What was the total number of words Allport identified to describe personality?
4,504 words
What is a characteristic of Psychoticism in Eysenck’s model?
Aggressive, cold, antisocial
What statistical method did Cattell employ?
Factor analysis
