Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [225]
One can only wonder why these experiments have not been replicated or emulated.
Trait theory, still the guiding view in personality research, has continued to mature, chiefly in the form of the “Big Five model” of trait theory.
For many years a number of researchers sought to look even deeper into factorial structure than Cattell did and to identify a smaller, more comprehensible, and more fundamental set of factors than his sixteen. Three decades ago, some of them, reworking Cattell’s correlation data, said they could find evidence of five superfactors. Over the years others have found one or more of the same five, in assorted guises, when they put other widely used personality inventories through the statistical wringer. By the 1990s, most personality psychologists had come to agree that the Big Five are the basic dimensions of personality.87 Since then, different researchers have modified some of the factor names, but the Big Five are the basis of current trait theory. They are:
—Extraversion, the factor some personality inventories list under such related labels as sociability, activity, and interpersonal involvement.
—Neuroticism, or, in the terminology of other studies, emotionality, emotional stability, and adjustment.
—Openness to Experience, also identified as inquiring intellect, intelligence, and “intellectance” (an unnecessary neologism that, fortunately, has not caught on).
—Agreeableness, also appearing as likability, altruism, trust, sociability, and so on.
—Conscientiousness, or dependability, superego strength, and restrained self-discipline, among other aliases.
These, according to present thinking, are the crucial and governing personality factors; the multitude of specific traits that account for the richness and variety of human personality are branches and twigs of these five trunks. Although these superfactors blur rather than focus the vision—imagine Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, or Lear described in terms of the Big Five—they offer researchers and clinical psychologists a set of proven dimensions along which to construct personality research designs and organize the data of whatever personality tests they use clinically.88
Another aspect of the field’s maturing is the resolution of the “consistency paradox”: although individuals have measurable traits and recognizable personalities, the behavior of any individual in a particular situation is a far from certain indication of how he or she will behave in others. The man who is brave under enemy fire may be cowardly in conflict with his wife; the woman who is a pillar of her church may, in her role as a company treasurer, plunder company funds to support a lover; the model family man and Little League dad may have a second wife elsewhere or be a closet public-lavatory homosexual.
Because of such cross-situational inconsistency, for years some psychologists attacked trait theory as having little validity. But more precise recent research data have led to a sensible resolution of the argument: the more similar the situations, the more consistent a person’s behavior; the less similar, the less consistent. As Walter Mischel of Columbia University, a leading personality researcher and former critic of trait theory, has written:
The data … do not suggest that useful predictions cannot be made. They also do not imply that different people will not act differently with some consistency in different types of situations… The particular classes of conditions or equivalence units have to be taken into account much more carefully and seem to be considerably narrower and more local than traditional trait theories assumed.89
The latest word on consistency and the prediction of behavior strikes a different note, but one that is good news: personality traits do tend to change over the life course—most of them for the better. Using a six-factor variant of the Big Five, a meta-analysis (a pooling of the mean changes reported in ninety-two studies