Natural Language and the Five-Factor Model
One way to avoid the controversies of competing psychological theories
is to turn to the description of personality offered by natural languagessuch as English. This approach draws on the folk wisdom embedded inthe language, and the resulting system will be readily understood by allspeakers of the language: You must be trained in Freudian theory toknow what an anal-retentive character is, but everyone understandswhat stubborn and stingy mean. Most importantly , however, the argu -
ment can be made that natural language can be used to define the full
scope of individual differences in personality . Personality differences areimportant in getting along with others, in work and play , in maintainingtraditions and creating new ones. Every culture must have evolvedwords to represent these differences, and over the course of centuriesevery important attribute or trait will surely have been noted andnamed (Norman, 1963). In their study of an unabridged dictionary ,Allport and Odbert (1936) found about 18,000 such trait-descriptiveterms—more than enough to occupy personality psychologists.
In fact, far more than enough—too many . Some screening, some
clustering of synonyms, is needed to make this language manageable.Allport and Odbert began that job by identifying about 4,000 terms thatmost clearly referred to personality traits. The next step was taken byRaymond Cattell (1946), who formed groups of synonyms from the4,000 words, eventually condensing them into 35 clusters. These wereused in a study of personality ratings; the 35 scales were factored and 12dimensions were identified. Combined with four additional dimensionsCattell had found in studies of questionnaires, these became the basis ofCattell’s personality inventory , the Sixteen Personality Factor Question -
naire, or 16PF (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970).
Our contributions to research on personality structure began with
analyses of 16PF data on a sample of volunteers participating in a longi -
tudinal study of aging conducted by the Veterans Administration in
Boston (Costa & McCrae, 1976). After considering a range of possiblesolutions, we settled on what seemed to be both simple and adequate: athree-factor model. T wo of the three dimensions were so similar toEysenck’s Neuroticism and Extraversion that we adopted those names;the third we called Openness to Experience.
Rokeach (1960), who was interested in the structure of ideas, had
written about dogmatic individuals who were not open to new ideas or34 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD