What do trait theorists believe

Trait theorists believe personality can be understood by positing that all people have certain traits, or characteristic ways of behaving. Do you tend to be sociable or shy? Passive or aggressive? Optimistic or pessimistic? According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are prominent aspects of personality that are exhibited in a wide range of important social and personal contexts.

In other words, individuals have certain characteristics that partly determine their behavior; these traits are trends in behavior or attitude that tend to be present regardless of the situation. An example of a trait is extraversion—introversion.

Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reserved and solitary behavior. An individual may fall along any point in the continuum, and the location where the individual falls will determine how he or she responds to various situations.

This image is an example of a personality trait. At one end is extraversion with a preference for more stimulating environments , and at the other end is introversion with a preference for less stimulating environments. An individual may fall at any place on the continuum.

The idea of categorizing people by traits can be traced back as far as Hippocrates; however more modern theories have come from Gordon Allport, Raymond Cattell, and Hans Eysenck. Gordon Allport was one of the first modern trait theorists. Allport and Henry Odbert worked through two of the most comprehensive dictionaries of the English language available and extracted around 18, personality-describing words.

From this list they reduced the number of words to approximately 4, personality-describing adjectives which they considered to describe observable and relatively permanent personality traits. Allport hypothesized that internal and external forces influence an individual's behavior and personality, and he referred to these forces as genotypes and phenotypes. Some people have criticized Jung for this apparent sexism, but we should note that a good third of men are feelers, and a good third of women are thinkers, so it is not a simple "men vs.

Plus, Jung said that there is no reason to value thinking over feeling - each has its strengths and weaknesses. Note also that feeling men may feel odd, as may thinking women. Stereotypes do the greatest harm when they prevent individuals from being what they in fact are! The last contrast is judging versus perceiving.

Judging people tend to be more like Freud's anal retentive types - neat, orderly, hardworking, always on time, scheduling things very carefully. College professors tend to be judging! Perceiving people are more spontaneous. They prefer to do things as the spirit moves them.

They are probably more fun than the judging types but, as you can imagine, they tend not to get things done. It often seems to us college professors that college students are all perceiving. When you take the Myers-Briggs or similar tests like the Keirsey, you get a set of four letters: I for introvert or E for extravert, S for sensing or N for intuiting, T for thinking or F for feeling, and J for judging or P for perceiving.

I, for example, am an INFP, which is in fact quite accurate. That's why she controls the family finances! On the other hand, we are both introverted and feeling, which means that you are more likely to find us crying over a rented movie than out at some wild party! Hans Eysenck was the first psychologist to make this trait or temperament business into something more mathematical: He gave long lists of adjectives to hundreds of thousands of people and used a special statistics called factor analysis to figure out what factors - trait dimensions - carry the most weight.

Instead of making these traits either-or, like Jung did, he saw them as dimensions. His first trait dimension was, like Jung, extraversion-introversion. But rather than say you were one or the other an I or an E , he gave you a score on extraversion-introversion: A low score meant you were introverted, a high score extraverted. Of course, this meant you could be halfway in-between - as in fact most people are!

His second trait dimension he called neuroticism. If you scored high on this scale, that meant you tended to be a very nervous, emotional sort of person. While it doesn't mean you are necessarily a neurotic, it does mean you are more likely to develop neurotic problems such as phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and depression than someone who scores low.

Low neuroticism is nowadays often called emotional stability. The third dimension is called psychoticism. He added this later in his research, after he had gotten more data from people who were in mental institutions.

As the name implies, these are people with tendencies to psychosis, meaning that they are more likely to have problems dealing with reality. Psychotic people sometimes have hallucinations and often have delusions such as odd beliefs about being watched, perhaps by the CIA or even by creatures from other planets.

A middle score on psychoticism might mean that you are a bit eccentric or that you take risks that other people aren't as likely to take. A low score means that you are pretty normal in this regard. Eysenck's research gets a great deal of respect, and most psychologists see his theory as on the right track. Another personality theory, called the Five Factor Model , effectively hits a middle ground, with its five factors referred to as the Big Five personality traits.

It is the most popular theory in personality psychology today and the most accurate approximation of the basic trait dimensions Funder, The five traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism [link].

In the Five Factor Model, each person has each trait, but they occur along a spectrum. Openness to experience is characterized by imagination, feelings, actions, and ideas. People who score high on this trait tend to be curious and have a wide range of interests. Conscientiousness is characterized by competence, self-discipline, thoughtfulness, and achievement-striving goal-directed behavior.

People who score high on this trait are hardworking and dependable. Extroversion is characterized by sociability, assertiveness, excitement-seeking, and emotional expression. People who score high on this trait are usually described as outgoing and warm. Not surprisingly, people who score high on both extroversion and openness are more likely to participate in adventure and risky sports due to their curious and excitement-seeking nature Tok, The fourth trait is agreeableness, which is the tendency to be pleasant, cooperative, trustworthy, and good-natured.

The last of the Big Five traits is neuroticism, which is the tendency to experience negative emotions. People high on neuroticism tend to experience emotional instability and are characterized as angry, impulsive, and hostile.

Watson and Clark found that people reporting high levels of neuroticism also tend to report feeling anxious and unhappy. In contrast, people who score low in neuroticism tend to be calm and even-tempered. In the Five Factor Model, each person has five traits, each scored on a continuum from high to low. The Big Five personality factors each represent a range between two extremes. In reality, most of us tend to lie somewhere midway along the continuum of each factor, rather than at polar ends.

To find out about your personality and where you fall on the Big Five traits, follow this link to take the Big Five personality test. Trait theorists attempt to explain our personality by identifying our stable characteristics and ways of behaving. They have identified important dimensions of personality. The Five Factor Model is the most widely accepted trait theory today.