1997). Beyond this, a few personality descriptors simply do not fit well within
the five-factor model. These maverick traits include religiousness, youth-
fulness, frugality, humor , and cunning (MacDonald, 2000; Paunonen &
Jackson, 2000; Piedmont, 1999; Saucier & Goldberg, 1998).
Other researchers point out that even when five factors emerge from factor
analytic studies, they do not always look the same when one study is compared
to another. Indeed, researchers disagree on what to call some of the factors.
This has prompted some critics to ask, “Which Big Five? ”In response to this
criticism, proponents have argued that the similarities between the factors un-
covered using different methods and different populations are really quite re-
markable (McCrae, 2001). Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find manyexamples within the field of personality research of such consistent findings.
Third, the five-factor model has been criticized for being atheoretical
(Briggs, 1989; H. J. Eysenck, 1997). That is, researchers did not anticipateahead of time how many factors they would generate from their factor ana-
lytic studies or what those factors might be. As described in Chapter 2, this
lack of prediction beforehand leaves the results of the research open to anynumber of explanations. Some personality theorists speculate that there may
be evolutionary reasons for the development of five major dimensions of per-
sonality; others have guessed that the five factors relate to some kind of neu-
rological structure. But because these hypotheses were generated after the
results of the research were seen, researchers have no evidence to explain
why these particular factors emerge in their research.
If personality researchers continue to find evidence for the five-dimension
model of personality, would this mean that psychologists would be better offexamining only five main traits instead of the hundreds they now investigate?
The answer is “No.” In most cases, examining a specific trait is more useful
for predicting behavior than measuring a global personality dimension(Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988; Paunonen, 1998; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).For example, being sociable and being adventurous may be part of the larger
personality concept of Extraversion. However, if researchers want to under-
stand how people act in social situations, it is probably more useful to exam-ine their sociability scores than to measure the more general dimension of
Extraversion. This is exactly what researchers found when they looked at co-
operative and competitive behavior (Wolfe & Kasmer, 1988). AlthoughExtraversion scores predicted who would act cooperatively and who would
act competitively, researchers obtained even better predictions when they
looked at scores for sociability.
Another example makes the point even clearer. Scales designed to mea-
sure the Big Five personality dimensions usually combine subscales measuringanxiety with subscales measuring depression as part of the global dimensionNeuroticism (Briggs, 1989). Although it makes sense that both anxiety and
depression contribute to this larger dimension, surely psychotherapists and re-
searchers will want to know which of these emotional difficulties their clientsand participants are suffering from.
This is not to say that understanding where an individual falls on the ba-
sic five dimensions is not useful. On the contrary, research suggests that the164 CHAPTER 7 The Trait Approach