236 Structures of Personality Traits
case, the search for single words is a defining characteristic of
the lexical approach. But the question of how to select the
single words has no straightforward answer; a number of
decisions must be made.
A first decision concerns grammatical categories. Most
investigators, from Galton (1884) on, have concentrated on
adjectives (for an overview, see De Raad, 2000; Saucier,
Hampson, & Goldberg, 2000). Goldberg (1982) and De
Raad (1992) have studied type nouns, alphabetically running
from ace to zombie in American English, but there is a con-
sensus that this category does not add much (cf. extraverted
vs. an extravert) or consists of invectives that have uses
other than describing personality. A more interesting addition
to adjectives are personality-descriptive verbs, which run
from abandon to yield (not counting zap, zip, and zigzag) in
English, denoting acts that would be more characteristic of
one person than another. De Raad’s (1992) analyses of per-
sonality verbs and nouns, however, do not result in novel
content over the factors found in adjectives. The focus on
adjectives does not recoil significantly on the implicit defini-
tion of personality.
A second set of operations consists of exclusion cate-
gories, for example, moods (e.g., sad), body characteristics
(e.g., fat), social relations (e.g., subordinate), attitudes (e.g.,
progressive), and effects (e.g., famous). These exclusions are
unproblematic because the categories are outside the domain
of personality traits. Two other categories, however, deserve
special consideration. One is called mere evaluations (e.g.,
good). In the language of personality, content and evaluation
are intimately connected: On the one hand, neutral content is
hard to find; on the other, mere evaluation is equally scarce.
Tellegen (1993), in particular, has argued against excluding
this category and has shown that it contains variance over and
above the five factors (Almagor, Tellegen, & Waller, 1995).
Thus, the 5-D model entertains a conception of personality
that is somewhat sterilized with respect to evaluation.
The other problematic category is one that is invariably
included, containing adjectives denoting intelligence, capa-
bilities, talents, erudition, and the like—thus, the kind of
maximum-performance traits that have traditionally been dis-
tinguished from typical-behavior traits. This inclusion is not
an automatic consequence of the lexical approach; Ostendorf
(1990), for example, sharply distinguished between tempera-
ment and character on the one hand, and skills and talents on
the other, before joining the two sets of traits under the head-
ing of dispositions. One could simply state that the 5-D
approach has opted for the broader of the two definitions of
personality, including not only temperamental or stylistic as-
pects (most notably Factors I, extraversion-introversion, and
IV, emotional stability vs. neuroticism) and character (most
notably Factors II, agreeableness, and III, conscientiousness),
but also intellect, erudition, and the like (Factor V; see
Hofstee, 1994b). However, I voice some reservations regard-
ing that inclusive choice when discussing Factor V later.
A final operation consists of the exclusion of technical,
highly metaphorical, and otherwise difficult terms. As I
argued earlier, that procedure is probably not very conse-
quential with respect to the scientific concept of personality,
even though the literary loss is considerable. In constructing
the FFPI, however, Hendriks (1997) went one step further
and retained only items that were found perfectly compre-
hensible by students of lower professional education. Of the
1,045 brief expressions (e.g., Wants to be left alone) that
made up the pool from which the items were chosen, 34%
met this criterion. In a set of 195 trait-descriptive adjectives
carefully selected to cover the factors of the 5-D model, only
14% did. It is a sobering thought that the founding studies of
the 5-D model could not have been meaningfully carried out
with these respondents. Furthermore, this sharpening of the
comprehensibility criterion does appear to have conse-
quences for the content of Factor V, as is shown next.The Credentials of the Fifth FactorThe most spectacular vindication of the 5-D model has been
brought forward by Ostendorf (1990). In the introduction to
his study, Ostendorf related that he viewed the model with
great skepticism at first, as the available American studies
were based on very small samples of trait variables that had
been composed using very subjective criteria (Ostendorf,
1990, p. 9). Not only this initial skepticism, but also the fact
that the replication was completely independent, started from
scratch, and was carried out in another language, added to the
credibility of the 5-D model. Ostendorf, however, expressly
included ability adjectives; consequently, his Factor V is a
clear intellect factor defined by such terms.
In our Dutch lexical project, subjects were asked whether
an adjective would fit in the framing sentence “he/she is
[adjective] by nature” (cf. Brokken, 1978) in order to deter-
mine an adjective’s prototypicality as a trait descriptor. Adjec-
tives like dull, gifted, capable, brilliant, one-sided, idiotic,
sharp, and ingenious received very low prototypicality ratings
(along with other categories of terms, most notably social-
effect adjectives like horrible, commonplace, and captivating).
In a selection of terms used by De Raad (1992) to establish the
replicability of the 5-D model in the Dutch language, terms
with low prototypicality were excluded; consequently, no
clear fifth factor appeared. In a Dutch-German-American
comparison (Hofstee, Kiers, De Raad, Goldberg, & Ostendorf,
1997), the correspondence between the American and German