Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we're gonna consider how
we determine which traits to assess when thinking about personality. So in the 1930s Gordon Allport
and Henry Odbert looked through dictionaries and they pulled out all of the terms that they thought
could refer to personality and, based on this, they came up with a list of over 18,000 words that
could be used to describe someone's personality. Now within these 18,000 of course there were
many synonyms and lots of overlap but one thing that Allport proposed, and here's a picture of
Allport here, was that we can think about traits as being in a hierarchy in terms of how much they
influence a person's personality. So he thought we could have cardinal dispositions, and these
were traits that influenced almost everything a person does, and then we have central traits,
and those influence a large number of thoughts and behaviors. And then lastly, we would have
secondary traits and these influence only a few thoughts and behaviors. Now, we have to be careful
when thinking about determining the importance of a trait because we might be influenced by other
factors. In other words, we might think that a trait is more important than it is and this brings
us to the 1940s, when researchers were interested in a trait they called authoritarianism. And this
was because of the rise of fascism. So they thought there might be a personality trait
that could explain this and so we had this idea of authoritarianism; which referred to a tendency
towards obedience, conformity, and political conservatism. The problem is that over time
interest in authoritarianism as a trait waned and so this shows us we have to be careful that we
might think a trait is important at a particular time but later maybe it turns out it isn't that
important or it's not the best way to explain something. So how do we determine which traits
really matter? Well, one way we can do that is we don't decide. We let the statistics decide.
In other words, instead of trying to guess which traits are most important, we simply
measure as many traits as we can and then we look for correlations between those traits. And that's
going to tell us what actually matters, what's the most important. This is a technique we saw
already when discussing intelligence called factor analysis. So in the case of intelligence we looked
at many different skills and then we tried to pull out common factors from those skills and
we got something like g for general intelligence. So how would that look for a personality? Well,
the idea is that we look for many items that we've assessed, so a large number of traits, and then we
see if we can come up with a single label that refers to many correlated items. So a factor
would be the label that we have for referring to many things that are correlated. So what does that
actually look like well? Let's say in the case of personality we went out and measured a bunch of
items we have a bunch of traits here and we find that people who score highly on kindness also
score highly on compassion. And they also score highly on loyalty. And they don't score highly on
rudeness, but they also score highly on empathy. So we might look at this list and say there's
something that these things have in common. There's something about kindness, compassion,
loyalty, and empathy that sort of goes together. And if we then did some statistical analysis of
people's scores we might find that all of these scores are correlated. So what that means is that
we might be able to come up with a single factor that actually explains all of these. And so then
we would come up with a label for this and in this case we might say that we could use the label
agreeableness. Now people will disagree about exactly what the label should be because it might
have some connotations. They don't agree with for certain terms but that's a little bit more
complicated. The idea is we come up with a single label and we say from now on "agreeableness"
is going to refer to all of these other things because we found correlations between all these
things; kindness, compassion, loyalty, empathy. Those are all correlated with one another for lots
of people who take these assessments and so we're just going to call that agreeableness. We can say
somebody is high in agreeableness; it means that they're high in all of these things. Ok, so that's
the way that we would use factor analysis to look at personality. Now, the next question
you might have is how many of these factors should we be trying to pull out from our data, you know?
Like how much can we group things together? Are we going to have just a few factors? Or maybe
we're gonna find many factors, I mean, after all we had 18,000 words before, so how many factors
can we narrow that down to? Well, one approach from Raymond Cattell, who we learned about in
intelligence, and here's a picture of Cattell here, for proposing the distinction between
crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence, and that was based on factor analysis. Cattell
applied factor analysis to personality and he created the 16PF test and this refers to sixteen
personality factors. His idea for these were that these were the source traits; these were the most
important factors for explaining personality. And his list included intelligence and we might think
that sixteen is still kind of a lot to think about it once, you know? Each person having sixteen
different factors that we're considering, maybe that's too many. Maybe we can narrow it down even
further. Maybe some of those factors are actually correlated with one another. And so at the
other extreme we could think of the work of Hans Eysenck, and here's a picture of Eysenck here, and
Eysenck initially proposed just two dimensions for thinking about personality. He boiled everything
down to saying that, well you have a level of introversion or extroversion, and then you also
have a level of neuroticism. And neuroticism refers to your level of emotional stability
or emotional instability. He thought these two dimensions could explain a lot of the differences
in people's personalities. So we could think of a chart here where we say, okay you have some level
of introversion or extroversion, and then you have some level of neuroticism, low neuroticism or high
neuroticism, and so the idea is we could pick somebody who, let's say they're highly neurotic,
right? They're very emotionally unstable but if they're also extroverted then maybe that
neuroticism is going to show itself in terms of aggression; they're going to be aggressive towards
others. But if they're really introverted and they're withdrawn then maybe they're just going
to come across as being very moody, right? They're there, they're at the same level of
neuroticism but they're expressing it differently because of this other dimension. Now Eysenck did
later add a third dimension. He thought maybe two wasn't actually quite enough and he added
a dimension called psychoticism, and that refers to somebody's lack of empathy, level of hostility,
and impulsiveness. But even just this two-factor model, we can see can explain a lot of differences
between people. And we can also liken it to Galen's four personality types based on humors,
right? Because we can see that each of these four quadrants here would match up with those
terms like sanguine, choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic. But we might think two or even
three is not quite enough to describe all of the nuances in terms of differences between people's
personalities. So in the next video we'll look at another model which is the Five Factor Model
which looks at five factors for explaining personality. I hope you found this helpful,
if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!