Factor structure of English-language personality type-nouns (original) (raw)

2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Although type-nouns (e.g., idiot, hero) are important in person description, lexical studies of personality have concentrated on adjectives. This study tested structural hypotheses using 372 highly familiar English-language type-nouns and descriptions by 607 participants of either themselves, a liked, or a disliked target person. Oneand 2-factor structures were most robust, and replicated similar structures found in previous adjectival studies. Additionally, the structure with 8 orthogonal factors had good replicability and applicability within singlegender subsamples; as in previous studies of type-nouns, it included factors corresponding directly to Extraversion and Intellect/Openness, but also to Attractiveness and Masculinity (or Ruggedness). The Big Five was only weakly replicated. Personality taxonomies based on adjectives are unlikely to be comprehensive, because type-nouns have different content emphases. Scholarly belief has it that over 2,300 years ago, Theophrastus (Theophrastus, 1909), a pupil of Aristotle, composed a catalog of 30 types of persons in a work entitled X␣␣⑀ (The Characters). For example, the types included o␣⑀␣ (the flatterer) and ⑀o␣ (the grumbler). Theophrastus represented personality attributes in the "type-noun" form, the sort of noun that would fit into an English sentence like "Robin is an x." Typenouns name a group or class of persons by virtue of their holding some attribute(s) in common (e.g., daredevils, geniuses). Adjectives Versus Type-Nouns The legacy of Theophrastus suggests that type-nouns are a preferentially rich medium for personality description, and a good basis for a taxonomy. In more recent times, Fourier (1841-1843) and Kretschmer (1925) classed persons psychologically in type-noun categories. But recent taxonomies of personality attributes have emphasized adjectives rather than type-nouns. The Big Five structure, consisting of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability/Neuroticism, and Intellect/Openness factors, provides an example. Early studies key to the development of the Big Five taxonomy (