PSYCH-UA 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Raymond Cattell, Agreeableness, Trash-Talk
8 Jan 2017
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The trait approach to the study of personality assumes that the di erences among people can be captured by talking about what traits a person has. The trick is to gure out which traits to use in forming a description of a person that succinctly captures who he is but also precise enough to predict his action. Raymond cattell gave a shortened list of words to a panel of judges, asking them to use these words to rate a group of people they knew well. Their ratings were compared to nd out which terms were redundant. This process allowed cattell to eliminate the redundant terms, yielding what he thought were the 16 primary personality dimensions. Some investigators further analyzed and found that several of cattell"s dimensions still overlapped, reducing it even more. Hans eysenck argued that just two dimensions were needed to describe all the variations in personality, although he later added a third.
