Personality is the collection of characteristic thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors that are associated with a person. Personality
traits are characteristic behaviors and feelings that are consistent
and long lasting.
Ancient Greek Ideas
The ancient Greeks believed that people’s personalities depended on the
kind of humor, or fluid, most prevalent in their bodies. The
ancient Greeks identified four humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow
bile—and categorized people’s personalities to correspond as follows:
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Sanguine: Blood. Cheerful and passionate.
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Phlegmatic: Phlegm. Dull and unemotional.
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Melancholic: Black bile. Unhappy and depressed.
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Choleric: Yellow bile. Angry and hot-tempered.
The Greek theory of personality remained influential well into the
eighteenth century.
Cattell’s Sixteen Traits
Like the ancient Greeks, modern researchers believe in the existence of a
few basic personality traits. Combinations of these basic traits, they believe,
form other traits. Psychologist Raymond Cattell used a statistical procedure
called factor analysis to identify basic personality traits from a
very long list of English words that identified traits. Factor analysis allowed
Cattell to cluster these traits into groups according to their similarities. He
found that personality is made up of sixteen basic dimensions.
The Big Five Traits
Other researchers have since clustered personality traits into even fewer
categories. Today, many psychologists believe that all personality traits derive
from five basic personality traits, which are commonly referred to as the
Big Five:
- Neuroticism
- Extraversion
- Openness to
experience
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
The Big Five traits remain quite stable over the life span, particularly
after the age of thirty. Although researchers identified the Big Five traits by
using a list of English words, these traits seem to be applicable in many
countries.
Criticisms of the Big Five Model
Critics of the Big Five have various arguments against the model:
- Some critics think that more than five traits are needed to
account for the wide personality differences among people.
- Other critics argue that five traits are too many. For example,
they point out that openness correlates positively with extraversion.
These critics argue that just three traits— neuroticism, extraversion,
and agreeableness—should be enough to fully describe personality.
- Still other critics argue that the Big Five are somewhat arbitrary
because they depend on the words used in the statistical analysis that
produced them. A different list of words may have yielded different
basic traits.
- Some psychologists have questioned the research
supporting the stability of the Big Five traits across cultures.
They argue that the research could be biased because the use of
Western tests is more likely to uncover cultural similarities than
differences.
