Psychology2016

522 CHAPTER 13

of a person’s traits. The video Tr a i t T h e o r i e s o f P e r s o n a l i t y describes this perspective in

more detail.

ALLPORT One of the earliest attempts to list and describe the traits that make up

personality can be found in the work of Gordon Allport (Allport & Odbert, 1936).

Allport and his colleague H. S. Odbert literally scanned the dictionary for words that

could be traits, finding about 18,000, then paring that down to 200 traits after elimi-

nating synonyms. Allport believed (with no scientific evidence, however) that these

traits were literally wired into the nervous system to guide one’s behavior across

many different situations and that each person’s “constellation” of traits was unique.

(In spite of Allport’s lack of evidence, behavioral geneticists have found support for

the heritability of personality traits, and these findings are discussed in the next sec-

tion of this chapter.)

CATTELL AND THE 16PF Tw o h u n d re d t r a i t s i s s t i l l a v e r y l a rg e n u m b e r o f d e s c r i p-

tors. How might an employer be able to judge the personality of a potential employee

by looking at a list of 200 traits? A more compact way of describing personality was

needed. Raymond Cattell (1990) defined two types of traits as surface traits and source

traits. Surface traits are like those found by Allport, representing the personality char-

acteristics easily seen by other people. Source traits are those more basic traits that

underlie the surface traits. For example, shyness, being quiet, and disliking crowds

might all be surface traits related to the more basic source trait of introversion, a ten-

dency to withdraw from excessive stimulation.

Using a statistical technique that looks for groupings and commonalities in numer-

ical data called factor analysis, Cattell identified 16 source traits (Cattell, 1950, 1966), and

although he later determined that there might be another 7 source traits to make a total

of 23 (Cattell & Kline, 1977), he developed his assessment questionnaire, The Sixteen

Personality Factor (16PF) Questionnaire (Cattell, 1995), based on just 16 source traits (see

Figure 13.4). These 16 source traits are seen as trait dimensions, or continuums, in which

there are two opposite traits at each end with a range of possible degrees for each trait

measurable along the dimension. For example, someone scoring near the “reserved” end

of the “reserved/outgoing” dimension would be more introverted than someone scoring

in the middle or at the opposite end.

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Watch the Video Trait Theories of Personality

introversion
dimension of personality in which
people tend to withdraw from
excessive stimulation.

source traits
the more basic traits that underlie
the surface traits, forming the core of
personality.

surface traits
aspects of personality that can easily
be seen by other people in the outward
actions of a person.