STRUCTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NATURALISTIC DESCRIPTIONS OF PERSONALITY

Using an open-ended questionnaire, each of a sample of college students was asked to describe the personalities of each of five people he or she knows well. A measure of concurrence of the most frequently used trait categories was used as input for hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. The resulting trait structure was interpreted in terms of selected, independently measured properties of the traits. Different properties were found to distinguish the clusters at different levels of the hierarchical structure. These properties, from "most basic" (hierarchical level with few clusters) to "least basic" (hierarchical level with many clusters) are: a. evaluation, b. impulsive- inhibited, G. hard-soft, d. intellectual good-bad, e. active-passive, and f. domi- nant-submissive. The most relevant properties for interpreting the multidimen- sional configurations are: a. evaluation, b. hard-soft, c. impulsive-inhibited, and d. introverted-extraverted.