Handbook of Psychology, Volume 5, Personality and Social Psychology

CHAPTER 10

Structures of Personality Traits

WILLEM K. B. HOFSTEE

231

CONSTRUCTING PERSONALITY
THROUGH QUESTIONNAIRES 232
The Hegemony of Questionnaires 232
Definitions of Personality by Self and Others 233
THE FUTURE OF THE FIVE-DIMENSIONAL MODEL 234
THE LEXICAL BASE OF THE
FIVE-DIMENSIONAL MODEL 235
The Lexical Axiom 235
Operationalizations of the Lexical Approach 235
The Credentials of the Fifth Factor 236
THE LINEAR APPROACH TO THE CONCEPT
OF PERSONALITY 237
The Case for Principal Component Analysis 238
A Review of the Grounds for the Number Five 239

The Person-Centered or

Typological Approach 239

HIERARCHICAL AND CIRCUMPLEX STRUCTURES 242

The Principal Component Analysis Plus Varimax

Taxonomic Model 242

The Double Cone Model 244

Generalized Circumplexes 245

A FAMILY MODEL OF TRAIT STRUCTURE 248

The Primordial One 249

The Two-Dimensional Level 250

Semicircumplex Spheres and Hyperspheres 250

CONCLUSION 252

REFERENCES 252

Operations reshape concepts. Over the past decades, the
very concept of personality has been subject to implicit re-
definition through a set of operations labeled the Big Five
taxonomyor the five-factor modelof personality. In a re-
stricted sense, the number five refers to the finding that most
of the replicable variance of trait-descriptive adjectives in
some Western languages is caught by five principal compo-
nents whose varimax rotations are named extraversion,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and
intellect (or openness to experience, autonomy, imagination,
and so on, depending on operational variations). In a wider
sense, however, the five-dimensional (5-D) approach has
come to represent no less than a paradigm—in particular, a
revival of the individual-differences or trait conception of
personality. For an evaluation of its status and future per-
spectives, a systematic analysis of its operational credentials
is in order.

A first module of the set of operations that constitute the

5-D paradigm consists of the questionnaire construction of

personality, whereby someone’s personality is defined through

his or her own answers, or more exceptionally through the

answers given by third persons, to standardized questions.

The questionnaire approach is not confined to the 5-D tradi-

tion, but it has to a significant extent been taken over by that

paradigm (the megamerger impressing some as monopolis-

tic). Is there a viable alternative to the questionnaire method,

and if so, would it change our view of personality?

A second, more specific, operational module contains

ways of choosing personality descriptors. The general guid-

ing principle in this module is the lexical approach that

consists of selecting items from a corpus of language, par-

ticularly a dictionary of that language. The distinguishing

characteristic of the lexical approach is its purposely induc-

tive nature, in contrast to approaches in which the descriptor

base is deduced from particular trait constructs, for example,

neuroticism. Again, the leading question is about the impact

of these operations on our conception of personality.

A third operational characteristic consists of reliance on

the linear model, particularly, principal component analysis

(PCA) of Likert item scales. This is probably the most

The author is greatly indebted to Lewis R. Goldberg, Gerard
Saucier, and Jos M. F. Ten Berge for their incisive comments on a
draft of this chapter.