Trait Theory

DESCRIBING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: TRAIT STRUCTURE AND HERITABILITY

PREDICTING BEHAVIOR AND LIFE OUTCOMES

THE PERSONALITY TRIAD: BEHAVIORAL CONSISTENCY, INDIVIDUAL COHERENCE, AND SITUATIONAL INFLUENCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Personality traits describe individual differences in human beings’ typical ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving that are generally consistent over time and across situations. Three major research areas are central to trait psychology. First, trait psychologists have attempted to identify sets of basic traits that adequately describe between-person variation in human personality. Second, social scientists across disciplines use personality traits to predict behavior and life outcomes. Third, trait psychologists attempt to understand the nature of behavioral consistency and the coherence of the person in relation to situational influences.

DESCRIBING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: TRAIT STRUCTURE AND HERITABILITY

There are two prominent approaches to identifying the basic personality traits and their organizational structure (McCrae and John 1992). The lexical approach emphasizes the evaluation of personality trait adjectives in the natural language lexicon and assumes that those personality descriptors encoded in everyday language reflect important individual differences, particularly if they are found across languages. The questionnaire approach attempts to assess important traits derived from psychologically based and biologically based personality theories. Self- and peerratings on sets of lexically derived or theoretically derived traits have typically been subjected to factor analysis to develop hierarchical organizations of traits reflecting a small number of broad superordinate dimensions overarching a large number of narrow-band traits. At the superordinate level, contemporary trait structural models vary in the number of dimensions necessary to organize lower-order traits, ranging from two to sixteen. Each of these models can be assessed via self- and peer-report using reliable and well-validated questionnaires and rating forms.

In the most influential and widely used structural model, thirty traits are hierarchically organized into five broad bipolar dimensions, reflecting a convergence of the Big Five lexical traits (Goldberg 1990) and the questionnaire-based five-factor model (FFM; Costa and McCrae 1992). The Big Five/FFM dimensions are neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Adherents of the Big Five/FFM model assert that these dimensions can be found across languages and personality measures, providing a comprehensive and parsimonious account of individual differences in personality.

Contemporary research on the heritability of traits has focused on the Big Five/FFM dimensions. Behavioral genetic studies have found substantial heritability ranging from 41 percent to 61 percent for the broad dimensions, with little evidence of shared environmental effects (Jang, Livesley, and Vernon 1996). Heritability of the narrowband traits of the FFM is more modest, ranging from 30 percent to 50 percent. It is widely believed that traits are influenced by multiple genes; molecular genetic studies, however, have not replicated results linking specific genes to personality traits. In addition to the genetic correlates of traits, promising new efforts by neuropsychologists using functional brain imaging and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings have begun to reveal the neural basis for traits.

PREDICTING BEHAVIOR AND LIFE OUTCOMES

Personality trait theory has been used in almost every branch of social science and practice. Researchers in clinical psychology have effectively used trait theory to predict both symptom-based psychopathology and personality disorders. Trait theories have also been used in treatment planning, as well as for understanding psychotherapy processes and outcomes.

Beyond clinical psychology, trait theory has been applied to industrial/organization psychology where it has been used to predict employee satisfaction and job performance. Personality traits have also been of interest to forensic psychologists in predicting psychopathic and deviant behavior. Other areas in which traits have been successfully employed include: predicting mate selection as well as marital satisfaction, social psychology, counseling, studies of human development across the lifespan, cross-cultural studies, learning and educational outcomes, and health-related behaviors and outcomes.

THE PERSONALITY TRIAD: BEHAVIORAL CONSISTENCY, INDIVIDUAL COHERENCE, AND SITUATIONAL INFLUENCE

Trait theory implies that personality and behavior exhibit levels of temporal stability and cross-situational consistency. There is strong empirical support demonstrating that the rank order of individuals on various trait dimensions is stable (Roberts and DelVecchio 2000), as well as support that individuals’ behavior is relatively consistent across situations (Funder and Colvin 1991). It is also quite evident, however, that situational influences also impact stability and variability of behavior. For many years, the “person–situation debate” generated significant advances in the study of behavioral consistency and variability (Kenrick and Funder 1988), leading to contemporary interactionist models.

Since the early 1990s, evidence has accumulated supporting conceptions of within-person behavioral variability as classes of stable individual differences at the level of both psychological states and behaviors. While evidence of variability was first interpreted as support of situational influences, contemporary views propose a comfortable coexistence of large within-person variability and large between-person stability in the study of personality (Fleeson 2001; Fleeson and Leicht 2006; Funder 2006). This has recast the person–situation debate into an effort to integrate personality variability and stability.

These contemporary integrative models involve con-textualization of within-person behavioral variability and between-person consistency within the situation and include the cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel and Shoda 1995), knowledge-and-appraisal personality architecture (Cervone 2004), the density distribution of states approach (Fleeson and Leicht 2006), and the latent state-trait theory (Steyer, Schmitt, and Eid 1999). At varying levels of specificity, these models all employ intrapersonal perceptual and meaning-making processes (e.g., explicit cognitive and affective subsystems are often proposed). As suggested by David C. Funder (2006), the future success of such approaches also requires identification of the psychologically salient aspects of situations.

SEE ALSO Nature vs. Nurture; Personality; Person-Situation Debate; Temperament

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cervone, Daniel. 2004. The Architecture of Personality. Psychological Review 111 (1): 183–204.

Costa, Paul T., Jr., and Robert R. McCrae. 1992. Normal Personality Assessment in Clinical Practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment 4 (1): 5–13.

Fleeson, William. 2001. Toward a Structure- and Process-Integrated View of Personality: Traits as Density Distributions of States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (6): 1011–1027.

Fleeson, William, and Christine Leicht. 2006. On Delineating and Integrating the Study of Variability and Stability in Personality Psychology: Interpersonal Trust as Illustration. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (1): 5–20.

Funder, David C. 2006. Towards a Resolution of the Personality Triad: Persons, Situations, and Behaviors. Journal of Research in Personality 40 (1): 21–34.

Funder, David C., and Randall C. Colvin. 1991. Explorations in Behavioral Consistency: Properties of Persons, Situations, and Behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (5): 773–794.

Goldberg, Lewis R. 1990. An Alternative “Description of Personality”: The Big-Five Factor Structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (6): 1216–1229.

Jang, Kerry L., John W. Livesley, and Philip A. Vernon. 1996. Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study. Journal of Personality 64 (3): 577–591.

Kenrick, Douglas T., and David C. Funder. 1988. Profiting from Controversy: Lessons from the Person-Situation Debate. American Psychologist 43 (1): 23–34.

McCrae, Robert R., and Oliver P. John. 1992. An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications. In The Five-Factor Model: Issues and Applications. Spec. issue, Journal of Personality 60 (2): 175–215.

Mischel, Walter, and Yuichi Shoda. 1995. A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure. Psychological Review 102 (2): 246–268.

Roberts, Brent W., and Wendy F. DelVecchio. 2000. The RankOrder Consistency of Personality Traits from Childhood to Old Age: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies. Psychological Bulletin 126 (1): 3–25.

Steyer, Rolf, Manfred Schmitt, and Michael Eid. 1999. Latent State-Trait Theory and Research in Personality and Individual Differences. In Personality and Situations. Special issue, European Journal of Personality 13 (5): 389–408.

Aaron L. Pincus

Mark R. Lukowitsky