The Cognitive Foundations of Personality Traits

Hardly anything in psychology is as irking as the trait concept. Psychologists and laypersons alike use primarily adjective trait-names to characterize and even concep tualize the individuals they encounter. There are more than a hundred well-defined personality traits and a great many questionnaires for their assessment, some of which are designed to assess the same or very similar traits. Little is known about their ontogenetic development and even less about their underlying dynamics. Psy choanalytic theory was invoked for explaining the psychodynamics underlying a few personality traits without, however, presenting sufficient empirical evidence for the validity of these interpretations. In a reductionistic vein, behaviorally inclined psy chologists have propounded the thesis that all traits are acquired behaviors. Yet, this view neither reduces the number of personality tests nor explains the resistance of traits to modification by means of reward and punishment. Dissatisfied with these and some other less well-known approaches to person ality traits, we decided to explore whether applying our psychosemantic theory of cognition to the trait concept would do better. The way we had to follow was anything but easy.

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The authors present a new definition of traits, an explanation of trait dynamics in terms of meaning, a specification of trait characteristics that allows, for example, comparison of traits to determine whether a given personality disposition is a trait or not, the one relatively simple test that ca

Contenu

1. Traits: The Embattled Concept.- 2. Toward a Solution.- 3. The Trait and Its Constituents.- 4. Trait Dynamics.- 5. Characteristics of the Trait Pattern.- 6. A Methodological Interlude.- 7. The Answers: A Summary of Contributions.- 8. Traits and Human Behavior.- 9. Studies on Traits.- 10. Assessment of Personality Traits.- 11. Identifying Personality Traits.- 12. Characterizing Trait Scales and Factors.- 13. Meaning-Based Validation of Personality Traits.- Postscript.- Appendixes.- Appendix A. The Meaning Variables: List and Code.- Appendix B. Summary of Manifestations of Meaning Variables.- Appendix C. General Instructions for Coding the Meaning Questionnaire.- References.