Saucier, Gerard2023-10-242023-10-242022-07-01Saucier G (2022) Intimations of a New Paradigm for Lexical Studies in Psychology. Front. Psychol. 13:867491. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867491https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867491https://hdl.handle.net/1794/290104 pagesSeveral consecutive productive decades of research on basic dimensions of personality have given a firmer footing to the discipline due, in part, to contributions of lexical studies of personality. These studies helped establish more consensus as to structure—a set of a few dimensions worth measuring—which has enabled knowledge to accumulate within something of a standard assessment paradigm. Admittedly, these dimensions are quite broad, and if one wishes to characterize their content quite accurately, he or she must often resort to compound labels (e.g., honesty/humility, intellect/imagination). The factors they refer to are, basically, collages of more fine-grained components; the composition of the collages varies somewhat from one measure to another, and one language to another. There are, however, cracks in the paradigm. The “few dimensions” most widely regarded as measurement worthy—the Big Five—embody a good degree of ethnocentric bias, deriving from origin in Western samples and studies in and of Germanic-language-family contexts. These dimensions often replicate only partially or weakly. And, although these have good evidence for comparative predictive validity (in competition with SES and IQ; Roberts et al., 2007), the magnitude of prediction is not overwhelming. Better prediction is likely to come from more comprehensive models (Paunonen and Ashton, 2001; Mõttus et al., 2017). In lexical studies, five factors account for only a narrow slice—about a quarter—of the variance that stimuli based on the personality vocabulary can afford (e.g., Saucier and Iurino, 2020). Personality data are not 75% noise! Structures with far more than five factors (accounting for closer to half the variance) have recently been found to be replicable to a good degree (Saucier and Iurino, 2020).enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USPersonality structuresIndividual differencesFactor structureCultureLanguageArticle