Difference between revisions of "Personality of Mice and Men"

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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.

Abstract

As Brokken (1980), following Goldberg's (1977) approach, has shown, the greater part of the correlations between personality descriptive adjectives, as used in daily language, may be represented by means of a six-dimensional vector space. In this study the suggestions of Guilford & Hoepfner (1969), Cattell & Sullivan (1962) and Gorsuch (1974) amongst others, have been followed, namely that if generally agreed upon external criteria are available, a criterium rotation may render factors ( -and labels- ) to span the resulting 6-dimensional personality-adjective space in a way more convenient for experimentation and manipulation than a simple (- rotated or unrotated -) principal component solution could possibly be.

Criteria from model of personality trait dimensions and social-role dimensions and their interrelations, as derived from experimental research on animal behaviour, are used in this study to replace 6 orthogonal factors of personality descriptive adjectives by some 9 dimensions, each of which represents either a temperament trait, a social-role dimension, or some sort of skill. The resulting dimensions are correlated in many instances and can easily be fitted in a systematic theory of personality dynamics. It is argued that this finding supports the hypothesis that the major part of the most conspicuous personality dimensions in men is due to the mere fact that humans are socially living mammals.

Finally, some implications are briefly discussed which follow from applying this dynamic model of personality dimensions to human behaviour.

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.)