PSY230H5 Lecture Notes - Trait Theory, Lexical Hypothesis, Factor Analysis
25 Oct 2010
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Lexical hypothesis: people will invent words for personality traits that have the largest consequences on their lives. The traits that are important enough will be translated into all languages. Therefore, the most important traits will have a word in each language. Use that language"s personality trait lexicon to determine important personality traits. Go through the dictionary and list all the words. Then they eliminate words that are rarely used. The list is given to participants where they will either rate themselves or a close other on a scale of how well the adjective describes their personality. 4 major categories of words: personality traits, temporary states, higligh evaluative judments, physical characteristics: allport and odbert (1936): Eliminated unrelated words (phys charact, momentary sstates, evaluative) 4500 words: implicit personality theory. Use people"s perceptions of relatedness to create taxonomies of personality traits. Intuition of which words are related problematic: empirical correlations. More often, use correlation coefficients as a measure of relatedness.
