Consumer & Gadgets

AI has personalities and they're sometimes mean

It's bad enough most of us must deal on occasion with coworkers or store clerks who are tactless or rude. And the more we entrust our finances, transactions and business affairs to automated representatives, the more frustration ...

Consumer & Gadgets

CES 2023: 10 tech innovations that caught our eye

From electric cars and boats to wireless TVs to the latest phones and tablets, there was a wide range of innovations on display at the CES tech show in Las Vegas last week. Some of it aimed to solve big real world problems. ...

Machine learning & AI

Machine learning to predict if you'll leave your partner

The life satisfaction of both partners and the woman's percentage of housework turned out to be the most important predictors of union dissolution, when scholars affiliated to Bocconi's Dondena Centre for Research on Social ...

Machine learning & AI

Machine learning predicts marital discord

The life satisfaction of both partners and the woman's percentage of housework turned out to be the most important predictors of union dissolution, when scholars affiliated to Bocconi's Dondena Centre for Research on Social ...

page 1 from 2

Trait theory

In psychology, Trait theory is a major approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of traits, which can be defined as habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. According to this perspective, traits are relatively stable over time, differ among individuals (e.g. some people are outgoing whereas others are shy), and influence behavior.

Gordon Allport was an early pioneer in the study of traits, which he sometimes referred to as dispositions. In his approach, central traits are basic to an individual's personality, whereas secondary traits are more peripheral. Common traits are those recognized within a culture and may vary between cultures. Cardinal traits are those by which an individual may be strongly recognized. Since Allport's time, trait theorists have focused more on group statistics than on single individuals. Allport called these two emphases "nomothetic" and "idiographic," respectively.

There is a nearly unlimited number of potential traits that could be used to describe personality. The statistical technique of factor analysis, however, has demonstrated that particular clusters of traits reliably correlate together. Hans Eysenck has suggested that personality is reducible to three major traits. Other researchers argue that more factors are needed to adequately describe human personality. Many psychologists currently believe that five factors are sufficient.

Virtually all trait models, and even ancient Greek philosophy, include extraversion vs. introversion as a central dimension of human personality. Another prominent trait that is found in nearly all models is Neuroticism, or emotional instability.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA