Trait Approach To Personality Analysis

The aim of this essay is to describe the trait approach and critically evaluate its contribution to our understanding of personality. Personality is said to address many issues but the three main ones are, Human universals, individual uniqueness and individual difference. Personality scientists define the word personality in a very different manner then what we use in an everyday context, personality psychologists say that personality may refer too “psychological qualities that contribute to an individuals enduring and distinctive patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving” (Pervin and Cervone 2010). This means that personality characteristics are consistent over time and over a wide range of situations, people have personalities that are

These are description, prediction and explanation of personality. When describing a person’s typical behaviour, descriptive facts must be addressed by theories of personality. A personality classification is used so that anyone and everyone can be described instead of just focusing in on individual people, this allows a better scientific analysis on which people can be plotted. “A trait taxonomy is a way of classifying people according to their characteristic, average types of experience and action” (Pervin and Cervone 2010). Prediction is one prominent question in the history of trait theories is whether or not this taxonomy of subjects is of any practical value and whether these predictions of one’s personality can be seen in the subject’s everyday activities and behaviour. This becomes an area of interest when it comes to employers or trait psychologists who have developed tests that can measure a subjects characteristic personality traits to help predict whether for example an employee is diligent. Explanation is the third scientific function but not all trait psychologists use this third function, some limit themselves to just prediction and description. Explanation focuses on the reasons behind a person’s personality traits, scientific reasons are views, such as biological factors and genetic

This model is used to decide personality and is one of the applications of the trait theory. This model was developed to allow people to rate themselves or others on a list of traits that were carefully selected to allow it to be easy and straight forward to follow. The ratings were split into groupings that were researched so that they would remain constant and stable throughout a person’s life but also be both reliable and valid when taking part in the actual plotting. The ‘Big Five’ was called so because to display five key personality traits you would have to score very highly on the scale, yet with each came a number of smaller traits that could also be attributed to the respondent. These big five characteristics were, Openness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and