What is Personality - Part 3 - You're Somewhere Between Introverted and Extraverted, and Cattell Created the Test to Find Out

The Trait-Disposition Model

Cattell began the study of personality (and psychology in general) by first defining how he would conduct that study. The psychologist had determined that the most effective way to learn about anything was to first gather enormous amounts of information, examine that information in order to formulate a specific hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and repeat the process, eliminating hypotheses until the most accurate one remained.

Cattell also defines personality using the term Trait. For him, a Trait is a permanent entity, one that is present from birth or that develops throughout life and determines a person's behavior. A trait also exists at different hierarchical levels, with some traits being more general (e.g., extraverted) and others more specific (e.g., sociable). Everyone can be seen as falling somewhere along the Trait dimension (e.g., we all fall somewhere on the dimension that ranges from introverted to extraverted).

To define the traits that best describe a person's personality, Cattell used Allport and Odbert's lexical research and submitted the personality-describing words to a new method of statistical analysis that had become possible with the evolution of computers.

This procedure, Factor Analysis, developed by psychologists Spearman and Thurstone who focused on the study of intelligence, was designed with the goal of finding a higher-order factor that explains a set of smaller factors. So, all those previously identified adjectives were first applied to a large number of people, asking them to rate the degree to which each adjective applied to them. All this information was then submitted to Factor Analysis, and Cattell discovered that a number of these adjectives tended to appear together — that is, they converged into one single factor.

This analysis means that a person who tends to be tender also tends to be dependent, overprotected, and sensitive. Knowing this, it might be possible to find a word or expression that collectively refers to all four adjectives at once. Cattell named this specific factor Tender-minded. Thus, a tender-minded person is someone who tends to be tender, dependent, overprotected, and sensitive.

3.1. Personality Assessment from This Perspective

Cattell developed several instruments to measure personality in this way. Among them, the one that gathered the most validity was the 16 Personality Factors (16PF), and it is currently used in a range of contexts, from clinical to industrial, accurately measuring the factors identified by Cattell.

However, other researchers who attempted to replicate Cattell's study were unable to arrive at these 16 factors, implying that Cattell's factors are not, in fact, the most representative factors of human personality.

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