title: Do Personality Traits Conform to Lists or Hierarchies?
abstract: Are personality traits mostly related to one another in hierarchical fashion, or as a simple list? Does extracting an additional personality factor in a factor analysis tend to subdivide an existing factor, or does it just add a new one? Goldberg's "bass-ackwards" method was used to address this question, based on rotations of 1 to 12 factors. Two sets of data were employed: ratings by 320 undergraduates using 435 personality-descriptive adjectives, and 512 Oregon community members' responses to 184 scales from 8 personality inventories. In both, the view was supported that personality trait structure tends not to be strongly hierarchical: allowing an additional dimension usually resulted in a new substantive dimension rather than in the splitting of an old one, and once traits emerged they tended to persist.
authors.affiliation: University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Loehlin
authors.affiliation: Oregon Research Institute, Eugene, OR, USA.
authors.forename: Lewis R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Goldberg
keywords: adjective self-ratings; bass-ackwards method; personality factors; personality scales; trait hierarchies