Suppose for the moment that, like many college freshmen living in on-campus
housing, you have been assigned a roommate you don’ t know. A few weeks
before classes, your new roommate sends you an e-mail message. After saying
hello and introducing himself or herself, your roommate asks: “What kind of
person are you?” When replying, you find describing your physical features is
relatively easy, and giving facts about your hometown or number of siblings
takes almost no time at all. But how do you describe your personality to
someone you have never met?
If you are like most people, you probably tackle this problem in one of
two ways. You might start by describing the type of person you are —a quiet
type, an independent type, an outgoing type. The other approach is to de-scribe your characteristics —studious, shy, friendly. In either case, the focus
would be on relatively stable features of your personality. In essence, youwould be using the trait approach to personality to answer the question.
People have tried to describe personality for probably about as long as
humans have used language. Gordon Allport (1961), one of the original trait
theorists, counted more than 4,000 adjectives in the English language that canbe used for this purpose. Thus an early challenge for personality psychologists
was combining all these characteristics into a usable structure. Some of the
first attempts to identify and describe personality were typology systems. The
goal was to discover how many types of people there are and identify each
person ’s type. The ancient Greeks divided people into four types: sanguine
(happy), melancholic (unhappy), choleric (temperamental), and phlegmatic
(apathetic). Another effort identified three basic personality types based on
general physique: endomorphic (obese), mesomorphic (muscular), and ecto-
morphic (fragile). The three types were said to differ in personality as well as
physical appearance (Sheldon, 1942).
Today personality researchers have largely abandoned typologies. The
problem is that several assumptions underlying the approach cannot bejustified. A typology assumes that ea ch of us fits into one personality cat-
egory and that all people within a category are basically alike. Further,the approach assumes that the behavior of people in one category is dis-tinctly different from the behavio r of people in other categories. You
can’t be a little of category A and a little of B. You must be either A or B.
These assumptions simply don ’t stand up to empirical scrutiny. Although
typologies are still popular with lay audiences (zodiac signs, for instance),
psychologists have replaced the typ e approach with the trait approach.
THE TRAIT APPROACH
Personality as Trait Dimensions
Almost any personality characteristic you can think of —optimism, self-esteem,
achievement motivation —can be illustrated with the trait continuum shownThe Trait Approach 149