Personality of Mice and Men
Heymans Bulletin HB-81-532-EX, State University of Groningen (RUG), 1981. by Popko P. van der Molen and Agnes A. de Graaf.
PERSONALITY OF MICE AND MEN
(Re-arranging Personality Dimensions in a Six-dimensional Adjective Space)
* The preparation of this paper has been made possible by the kind and patient support of the department of Personality Psychology of the Rijks Universiteit Groningen. For computational assistance the writers are indebted to Frank Brokken, Haring Land, Jos ten Berge and Hans Hommes.
Suggestions for improving a first and second draft were given by Jos ten Berge, Haring Land, Annemarie van der Molen, Hans van de Velde and especially by Boele de Raad. Margi Rothengatter corrected the worst mistakes in our use of the English language.
Introduction
This paper deals with dimensions of interindividual differences in personality or 'traits'. In traditional personality psychological research it has long been prevailent strategy to obtain basic data from individual subject scorings on tests or other variables that are a priori considered relevant for measuring 'traits'. Such a strategy is therefore ultimately bases on 'a priori's' concerning the relevance of certain sets of tests. As a consequence classical personality-psychological research has been strongly criticized, especially concerning these 'a priori's' (e.g. Mischel, 1976; Hogan e.a., 1977). In recent years, some psychologists have tried to avoid the shaky ground of these 'a priori's' by using exhaustive lists of personality-descriptive adjectives and ratings of individuals on these adjectives as basic material (Brokken, 1978; Hofstee, 1977; Goldberg, 1978). The factors resulting from factor analysis on such data can directly be interpreted by their strongest loading adjectives. In fact, such dimensions are vectors in a personality-descriptive adjective-space.
(Somewhat similar approaches have been applied before. Cattell's 16PF (personality factors) were ultimately based on reduction of an exhaustive set of trait names too (Allport and Odbert, 1936; Cattell e.a., 1970; Buss & Poley, 1976, pp. 71-77). In the present study it is prefered to deal directly with a primary, exhaustive and unreduced adjective space, rather than with a third- or fourth- degree derivate of it, especially since computational facilities for handling such enormous sets of data have recently become available.)
