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to be gathered under one term or heading; the word thoughtful, for instance,
combines the reactions of a person who is intelligent, conscientious, emotionally
stable and possibly other things. Cattell's groups of trait elements can be
reduced still further to 35 clusters of general description of personality as used
in everyday speech. He calls these clusters the surface traits. They describe
the features, qualities or characteristics of persons as observed in everyday life
by their companions, workmates, playmates and fellow citizens. Such a cluster
might be, for instance—surly, hard, thankless, hardhearted, embittered, shorttempered.
If we think about a number of people we know well, we may note
the great variation there is amongst them in their ability to do things, their
interests, their conscientiousness and reliability, whether they are steady or
emotional, or whether they are likeable or not.
The Source Traits of Personality.
For nearly half a century psychologists have searched for the basic or
source traits of personality and character. What are the real root differences
in personality make-up ? There have been dozens of classifications; we have
the fat jolly type, the thin mean type, or the assertive type, or acquisitive type
or amorous type, etc. In the field of mental illness patterns have been established
with considerably more certainty such as in the clinical conditions of schizophrenia
or split mind, mania, melancholia, delusional insanity and neurasthenia.
Some of these seem to fit in with the idea of being the extreme form of a mental
pattern often met with in normal people. The split mind type of personality is
one in which the person is able to think clearly and accurately and to make
sound judgments and yet seems curiously deficient in emotional feeling, resulting
in a withdrawal from social contacts, and conduct which is moody, rigid
and unadaptable. Mania is the extreme form of eagerness and joyous excitement.
Melancholia is the opposite—a feeling of depression, worthlessness and
anxiety. Statisticians describe the distribution of these types of personality
as forming a normal curve; thus, for instance, in intelligence, most people
are of average level, fewer and fewer people are found as we ascend the scale,
and similarly fewer and fewer as we descend the scale.
How to Find the Source Traits.
The method of finding the source traits used by psychologists is the
technique of factor analysis. In an experiment, a group of persons are classified
in numerous ways by others who know them well. The classification or rating
means making an assessment of their behaviour from a large list of descriptions
of pieces of behaviour or surface traits. Now there is no scale such as a scale of
inches by which we can measure, let us say, honesty; but we can compare
people in our minds and we can say that some person is scrupulously honest,
or substantially honest, fairly honest, neither particularly honest or dishonest,
slightly dishonest, often dishonest, or completely dishonest and untrustworthy.
Here we have a scale of honesty in which we can award seven marks for
scrupulous honesty, six marks for being substantially honest, five marks for
fairly honest, and so on down to one mark for the lowest category. Now we can
take some other trait such as assertiveness with its opposite extreme submissiveness,
and we can divide this one into seven grades as before. It is now
possible to classify person A on two traits, honesty and assertiveness, by giving
him marks. We can go on doing the same for as many other traits as we please
up to say 50 or 100. We do the same with person B, then with person C and so
on until we have a list of persons numbering say 250.
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