Trait taxonomies such as the Big Five have been effective in studying population-level trends, but may obscure important individual differences in the structure, stability, and personal relevance of individuals’ dispositional tendencies. Inspired by Gordon Allport’s notion that people may be defined by distinctive ‘organizing foci’ of personality, this dissertation introduces the central trait approach, which focuses on identifying the most defining aspects of an individual and understanding their unique manifestation in a person’s life. Paper 1 provides proof of concept for this framework by analyzing the content and properties of open-ended central trait descriptions across 4 datasets (n=1488). Here, I test how well trait content is captured by existing nomothetic trait taxonomies and examine what properties of a trait and its relation to the rest of an individual’s personality make it “central”. Doing so, I find that although these taxonomies capture central trait content for most people, many participants nominated at least one trait that fell outside of these taxonomies, indicating the advantages of a bottom-up, open-ended method. Further, central traits broadly reflected more extreme and socially desirable aspects of individuals’ personalities. Paper 2 expands beyond self-perceptions of central traits to examine their social reality in the eyes of others. Here, I compare the content of self- and close other informant- perceptions of central traits and explore self-other agreement and multi-rater consensus of these perceptions. I find broad similarities in the content and properties of self and other nominated central traits, and that agreement about specific individuals’ traits across was modest but above chance levels. Thus, although central trait perceptions have shared reality, these perceptions diverge, likely due to idiosyncrasies what people find salient about each other. Doing so, I open up new avenues for research into interpersonal perception research and the central trait approach can mutually inform each other. Overall, this dissertation furthers current understanding of how aspects of personality become personally and socially relevant, and lays groundwork for future idiographic study of traits.
idiographics, personality psychology, personality structure, personality traits
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