to oneself, is an important part of language acquisition. As naïve psy -
chologists, all English-speaking people subscribe to a trait theory of
psychology . Personality trait terms are also central to most or all otherhuman languages (Goldberg, 1981), probably because the language oftraits is so useful in facilitating interaction with other people that everyculture has invented it.
As scientists, trait psychologists have tried to go beyond the com -
mon sense view of traits. But the best of them, like Gordon Allport
(1937), have also acknowledged the contributions of the natural lan -
guage of traits. Human beings have been trying to understand and de -
scribe each other for thousands of years, and it would be presumptuous
indeed to suppose that psychologists could start from scratch and comeup with a better system in a few years. Trait researchers have borrowedfrom the common-sense system in two respects: First, trait conceptionsof personality have often begun by attempting to spell out the assump-tions behind the use of trait words. Second, trait measures have beenbased in varying degrees of immediacy on the language of traits that hasbeen built up over centuries. We return to that aspect later in this chap-ter.
We can define traits as dimensions of individual differences in tenden-
cies to show consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions . This is a
phenotypic definition; in essence, it tells us what traits look like andhow we can recognize one when we see it. A different, deeper definitionis also possible, but that will have to be postponed until FFT is intro-duced. We can go a long way with the present definition. Characterizingtraits such as shyness and trust as dimensions of individual differences
means that people can be ranked or ordered by the degree to which theyshow these traits. Some people are very trusting, most are moderatelytrusting, but a few are quite suspicious. In fact, all the traits that we areconcerned with in this book are found in varying degrees in all people,with distributions that approximate the familiar normal curve. Al -
though some personality theories describe types—distinct groups of
people characterized by a unique configuration of features—current re -
search supports the view that most so-called types are merely extreme
scorers on continuously distributed trait dimensions (McCrae & Costa,1989b; Widiger & Frances, 1985).
The more of a trait people have, the more likely they are to show
the behavior it disposes toward, and thus the more frequently we arelikely to see it. Similarly , the more the trait characterizes them, the moreA Trait Approach to Personality 25