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Overview of the Trait Psychologists

Cattell’s (1965) 3 personality types:

  • Cognitive or ability traits, e.g., intelligence;
  • Temperament or stylistic traits, e.g., easygoing, bold
  • Dynamic or motivational traits (includes interests), e.g. ambitious, power- hungry, or sports loving.


Fiske (1949) used 22 of Cattell's (1947) bipolar trait descriptors and came out with 5 clusters:

  • Social adaptability: Cheerful, talkative, adventurous, and adaptable.
  • Emotional control: Unshakable, self-sufficient, placid, lack of anxiety, lack of insecurity.
  • Conformity: Cooperativeness, seriousness, trustfulness, good-natured,
  • The inquiring intellect: Broad interests, independent minded, imaginative.
  • Confident self-expression: Assertive, talkative, marked interest in women.


Tupes and Christal - 4 trait clusters

  • Surgency. Talkativeness, frankness, adventurousness, assertiveness, etc
  • Agreeableness. emotionally mature, cooperative, trustful, kindly, etc
  • Dependability. Orderliness, responsibility, perseverance, conventionality
  • Emotional stability. No neurotic, placid, poised, not hypochondriacal, self-sufficient, not dependent


The 5 Factor Model (The Big 5) came out with 5 clusters:

  • Extroversion
  • Emotional Stability
  • Conscientiousness
  • Agreeableness
  • Open to Experiences


The above shows how behavioral psychologists organize traits into clusters or dimensions into some meaningful composition into personality types. Myer Briggs cameout with four pairs of bipolar traits and group personality into 16 types to explain behavior. Thomas International and the Big Fives use adjectival descriptors to explain behavior. Their approach assumes that everybody behavior is predictable. There is no difference in studying simple and complex people. You only need to describe them. You do not need to explain how they behave and why they behave that way. Their approach is entirely nomothetic not idiographic. Moreover, the adjectival descriptors are not evaluative. It does not differentiate good traits and bad ones. Its classification into personality types does not differentiates the perception of an individual and others perception of him/her. How an individual sees oneself is different from how others see the individual. How are we going to resolve this perception gap. Besides adjectival descriptor has its limitation. Words like agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness may not cover all aspect of the traits classify under this category.

A comprehensive personality theory should be able to explain the above pitfalls.


KYKO's five (5) dimension of trait clusters:

Egocentric Self
The need for power, image and control

Sociocentric Self
The need for love, care, companionship and affiliation Security Self
The need for safety, system, structure, order and protection

Self-Actualizing Self
The need for growth, progress, self development, achievement and fulfillment

Manipulative Self
The need to adapt, change and be flexible to survive in a turbulent dynamic environment.