Practice question · Multiple choice
Cattell derived his 16 personality factors by factor-analysing the trait words in a dictionary. Why would the vocabulary of a language be a defensible place to look for the structure of personality?
Hints
- Ask why a language would have a word for 'conscientious' at all.
- What has to happen, over generations, for a distinction to earn its own word?
Show the answer
C. Because of the lexical hypothesis: what matters becomes a single word.
Why
A distinction that repeatedly matters when dealing with people gets a word, and one that never matters does not, so the trait vocabulary is an accumulated record of what humans found consequential, gathered by no one and biased by no theory. It is why the Big Five carries weight: the same structure keeps emerging from languages with no shared ancestry.
Practise Introduction to Personality and Traits
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