Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 14. Eysenck, McCrae, and
Costa’s Trait and Factor
Theories© The McGraw−Hill^407
Companies, 2009C
hance and fortuity often play a decisive role in people’s lives. One such chance
event happened to an 18-year-old German youth who had left his native coun-
try as a consequence of Nazi tyranny. He eventually settled in England, where he
tried to enroll in the University of London. He was an avid reader, interested in both
the arts and the sciences, but his first choice of curriculum was physics.
However, a chance event altered the flow of his life and consequently the
course of the history of psychology. In order to be accepted into the university, he
was required to pass an entrance examination, which he took after a year’s study at
a commercial college. After passing the exam, he confidently enrolled in the Uni-
versity of London, intending to major in physics. However, he was told that he had
taken the wrong subjects in his entrance exam and therefore was not eligible to pur-
sue a physics curriculum. Rather than waiting another year to take the right subjects,
he asked if there was some scientific subject that he was qualified to pursue. When
told he could always take psychology, he asked, “What on earth is psychology?” He
had never heard of psychology, although he had some vague idea about psycho-
analysis. Could psychology possibly be a science? However, he had little choice but
to pursue a degree in psychology, so he promptly entered the university with a major
in a discipline about which he knew almost nothing. Years later the world of psy-
chology would know a great deal about Hans J. Eysenck, probably the most prolific
writer in the history of psychology. In his autobiography, Eysenck (1997b) simply
noted that by such chance events “is one’s fate decided by bureaucratic stupidity”
(p. 47).
Throughout his life, Eysenck battled bureaucratic stupidity and any other type
of stupidity he came across. In his autobiography, he described himself as “a sancti-
monious prig... who didn’t suffer fools (or even ordinarily bright people) gladly”
(Eysenck, 1997b, p. 31).
Overview of Trait and Factor Theories
How can personality best be measured? By standardized tests? Clinical observation?
Judgments of friends and acquaintances? Factor theorists have used all these meth-
ods and more. A second question is: How many traits or personal dispositions does
a single person possess? Two or three? Half a dozen? A couple of hundred? More
than a thousand? During the past 25 to 45 years, several individuals (Cattell, 1973,
1983; Eysenck, 1981, 1997a) and several teams of researchers (Costa & McCrae,
1992; McCrae & Costa, 2003; Tupes & Christal, 1961) have taken a factor analytic
approach to answering these questions. Presently, most researchers who study per-
sonality traits agree that five, and only five, and no fewer than five dominant traits
continue to emerge from factor analytic techniques—mathematical procedures ca-
pable of sifting personality traits from mountains of test data.
Whereas many contemporary theorists believe that five is the magic number,
earlier theorists such as Raymond B. Cattell found many more personality traits, and
Hans J. Eysenck insisted that only three major factors can be discerned by a factor
analytic approach. In addition, we have seen that Gordon Allport’s (see Chapter 13)
commonsense approach yielded 5 to 10 traits that are central to each person’s life.
However, Allport’s major contribution to trait theory may have been his identifica-
tion of nearly 18,000 trait names in an unabridged English language dictionary.
Chapter 14 Eysenck, McCrae, and Costa’s Trait and Factor Theories 401