Traits

Mini Review

• A trait is a difference between people in what they feel, do, and think that holds across situations and over time.
• Lasting traits are not the same as momentary states, social roles, learned skills, or habits.

How Do We Choose Which Personality Traits Matter?

• People’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors differ in a huge number of ways. How do researchers decide which differences to care about?
  • Description. We care about differences that people find important enough to describe in language.
  • Prediction. We care about differences that help predict how people will behave.

Our Polls: How Many Trait Words Did This Class Use?

Twenty of you described six different people, using four words each.

• 460 total words (minus typos/errors).
  • 78 words used two or more times.
  • 99 words used only once.

Which Trait Words Did This Class Use the Most?

Which Trait Words Were Used By the Most Students?

The Lexical Hypothesis

• Lexical hypothesis: The idea that the differences between people that matter tend to end up as words in their language.
  • The word lexical means “related to the words or vocabulary of a language.”
• The words you used in our polls came from ordinary speech.
• The lexical hypothesis treats a language’s vocabulary as a record of the individual differences people have found most useful to describe.
• That gives researchers a large pool of candidate traits to start from.

Poll: How Many Trait Words Are in the Dictionary?

How Many Trait Words Are in the Dictionary?

The dictionary study (1936): Two researchers read an English dictionary and pulled out every word that could be used to describe a person.

• Finding:
  • 18,000 total descriptive words.
  • 4,500 of them described lasting traits. The rest described passing states, physical features, social roles, or personal values.

But 4,500 Words Is Too Many

• 4,500 words is too many to be very useful to researchers trying to describe how personalities differ.
• Even the different words you all used to describe 6 specific people is too many for anyone to hold in their head at one time.
• We have to narrow them down somehow.

Which Trait Words Were Used By the Most Students for Each Person?

The Same Meaning Behind Different Trait Words

• Almost none of you used exactly the same four words to describe the same person type.
• But, most of you used words with similar meanings to describe each person type:
  • At least one word meaning kind/caring for your teacher
  • At least one word meaning loyal/reliable for your close friend
  • At least one word meaning confident/ambitious for a famous person
• Can we use the same idea to reduce our 4,500 trait words down to a much smaller number that still captures the most meaningful differences between people?