Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 197conditioned by the confluence of liberal individualism, capitalism, and
modern democracy in Victorian England. Buss (1976) writes:
In capitalistic British society there were great group or class
differences in the extent to which the different career and vocations
required different levels of intelligence and specialized training. How was
one to explain and justify the hierarchically structured occupational
groups and attendant social inequalities other than by the principle of
inherited individual differences in mental abilities? Indeed, the prevailing
democratic individualism, which stressed freedom for individual
development, would have been inconsistent with a primarily
environmental interpretation of individual differences in intelligence
given the gross class differences of capitalistic Britain. Thus all people
theoretically had the opportunity and freedom to develop their potential,
and the existent class structure therefore must represent inherited
individual differences in ability. Liberal individualism was still secure
and thereby conditioned the scientific interpretations of individual
differences. (p. 52)Buss thus emphasizes that within the social context of Victorian
England, there was an ideological necessity to interpret personality traits as
a biological inheritance rather than the outcomes of economic or cultural
inheritance, since an environmental and developmental interpretation of
intelligence and personality traits would give the lie to the liberal ideology
of individual freedom for personal and professional development.
A second major criticism of trait theory pertains to its use of
statistically correlated trait-constructs to make probabilistic claims about
the behavior of individual people. A fundamental claim of trait-theory
research, indeed according to James T. Lamielle (2013) its raison d’être, is
that, “knowledge of the statistical properties of trait constructs can enhance
the power and scope of scientific psychology’s capacity to account for
(predict, explain, understand) individual behavior.” (p. 66). Lamiell (2013)
specifies precisely what this claim entails, stating:
[G]iven knowledge of the correlation between trait variables X and Y
within some population, and then given knowledge of individual A’s