look at the parenting styles that lead to a high need for Achievement, and
psychologists interested in social anxiety sometimes examine the underlyingconcerns of shy people that cause them to avoid social encounters.
One of the major advantages of studying personality through the trait
approach is that we can easily make comparisons across people. A trait de-scription places people on a personality continuum relative to others. When
we say someone is feminine, we are saying that the person is more feminine
than most people. A researcher who concludes that “People high in self-
consciousness have difficulty making friends ”is really saying that these peo-
ple have a more difficult time making friends than people who score at thelower end of this continuum.
One distinction between the trait approach and many of the other
approaches to personality is that the trait approach has relatively little to sayabout personality change. Information collected by trait researchers can beuseful to therapists making diagnoses and charting progress during therapy.
In addition, many of the characteristics examined by trait researchers, such
as self-esteem and social anxiety, are relevant to a client ’s adjustment and
well-being. But research findings on personality traits typically provide only
a direction for how to change people who may be too high or too low on a
personality dimension. Trait psychologists are more likely to be academic re-
searchers than practicing therapists. Thus no major schools of psychotherapy
have evolved from the trait approach to personality.
IMPORTANT TRAIT THEORISTS
You will notice references to traits and trait measures scattered throughout
most of the chapters in this book. This is testimony to how widely accepted
the trait concept has become in perso nality psychology. Personality psy-
chologists from nearly every approac h, as well as researchers from many
other fields of psychology, use traits and trait measures in their work. Thee x p a n s i o no ft h et r a i ta p p r o a c hf r o mv i r t u a l l yn o t h i n g9 0y e a r sa g ot oi t sprominent influence today can be attributed in part to the pioneering
work of some early trait theorists. We ’ll look at some of their contribu-
tions next.
Gordon Allport
The first recognized work on traits by a psychologist did not appear until
1921. That was the year Gordon Allport, along with his brother Floyd, pub-
lished Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement . Gordon
Allport also taught what is believed to be the first college course on personal-
ity in the United States, in 1925 (Nicholson, 1997). Only one year after re-
ceiving his bachelor ’s degree, the unconventional Allport somehow managed
to arrange a meeting with Sigmund Freud. Allport wanted to talk psychology,
but Freud spent much of the time inquiring about Allport’ s unconscious
motives. As far as Allport was concerned, there were obvious, conscious152 CHAPTER 7 The Trait Approach