Traits

Trait

• Trait: A difference between people in what they feel, do, and think that holds across situations and over time.
• Something is a trait only if all three are true:
  • It is a difference between people in the ABCs.
  • It holds across situations.
  • It holds over time.

Traits: A Difference Between People in the ABCs

• Traits are about the ABCs: what a person feels, does, and thinks.
  • Ex: Being tall, being rich, and having brown eyes are real differences between people, but not traits.
• Broad traits show up in all three at once.
  • Ex: A conscientious person feels uneasy when something is unfinished (A), writes a plan and sticks to it (B), and thinks ahead about what could go wrong (C).
• Narrow traits usually lean on one.
  • Ex: Talkativeness is nearly all behavior. Anxiousness is nearly all affect.

Traits: How much difference?

• Everyone has affect, behavior, and cognition, so a trait is not something one person has and another does not.
• A trait tells you how much, compared to everyone else.
  • Ex: Everyone gets nervous. Whether Maya gets nervous more easily and more often than the people around her is the trait.
• A trait puts people in order along a spectrum.
  • Ex: Being American, being someone’s sister, and being left-handed are categories, not amounts.

Traits: How much difference?

Traits: Across Situations

• Nobody feels, thinks, or acts the same way all the time. Where we are changes what we do.
• Picture Maya in a job interview, in her 8 a.m. class, at lunch with friends, and at a party. She is not equally talkative in all four.
• Her numbers are spread out instead of landing in one spot. That spread is called variation.
• Maya’s trait is the average across all the situations, not any one of them.
• Any one situation is one number out of many, so watching Maya in her 8 a.m. class cannot tell you her trait.

Traits: Across Situations

Maya in eight different situations. One dot for each situation.

Traits: Across Situations

• Maya is more talkative than Andre in every one of the eight situations.
• Andre at a party is still more talkative than Maya in a job interview.
• But they still differ, because their averages sit in different places.

Traits: Over Time

• Measure the same person again months later and the average stays close to where it was.
• Traits do change, but it takes years, not days.
• One bad week does not change a trait.

Traits: Over Time

Not a Trait: State

• State: what a person feels, does, or thinks on one occasion.
• Same words as the trait definition. The only thing that changes is the time span.
• Moods are states, and so is being tired, nervous, or fired up right now.
• English uses one sentence for both, which is where the confusion comes from.
  • Ex: “She is anxious” can mean this afternoon or her whole life.

Not a Trait: State

Every dot is one occasion, so every dot is a state. The trait is the average of them, which means it is built out of states.

Traits Show Up Inside Them

• Traits influence which habits, skills, and roles a person ends up with.
  • Ex: A conscientious person tends to build more routines than other people do.
  • Ex: A curious person tends to pick up more skills than other people do.
• Traits also influence how a person handles the ones they have.
  • Ex: How patient Darius is with the children he tutors is partly his agreeableness showing up in that one corner of his life.
• Watching someone in a single role shows you a trait through a filter, so what you see is some of the trait and some of the role.
• That is why one setting is not enough to tell you a trait.

In Sum: The Three Requirements

• Trait: A difference between people in what they feel, do, and think that holds across situations and over time.
  • It is a difference between people in the ABCs.
  • It holds across situations.
  • It holds over time.