Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 195of trait theory, was inspired to take a descriptive approach to personality
after a fateful meeting with Sigmund Freud when he was a young college
graduate. Freud, upon first meeting Allport, attempted a ‘deep’
psychoanalytic interpretation of a passing comment made by Allport who
was attempting to establish a friendly rapport with Freud, which struck
Allport as absurd. This episode evidently left a lasting impression, as it
inspired Allport’s descriptive approach to personality.
Historically, Trait theories of personality have been informed by the
lexical hypothesis— the supposition that the most salient dimensions of
personality will be indexed within everyday language, most often being
encapsulated in single adjectives (i.e., happy, flexible, outgoing, shy, etc.).
Following the lexical hypothesis, early trait research attempted to amass
exhaustive lists of personality descriptors, such as Allport and Ogden’s
(1936) “Trait Names: A Psycho-lexical Study,” which identified 17,953
words describing personality traits in Webster’s New International
Dictionary (p. vi). Starting with everyday language descriptions of
particular mental and behavioral traits, trait theorists attempt to discover
higher order trait-types governing the expression of a range of what can be
identified as closely related traits. Clusters of traits that commonly appear
together can be identified through a statistical procedure called factor
analysis. For example, the higher-level trait-type of Extraversion
encompasses traits such as “sociability, impulsiveness, activity, liveliness,
and excitability” (Dumont, 2010, p. 174). However, the question of how
many distinct higher order trait-types can be logically derived from the
wide array of lower level traits has consistently plagued trait theories. For
instance, the original trait theory proposed by Hans Eysenck involved just
two dimensions along which traits varied—introversions-extroversion and
neuroticism. Commenting on Eysenck’s trait model, Dumont (2010) states:
This is as reductionist a model as one can find. Its utility is
demonstrated by the fact that its two dimensions are integrated into “all
major models of temperament and personality.” (p. 175)