Intimations of a New Paradigm for Lexical Studies in Psychology
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Date
2022-07-01
Authors
Saucier, Gerard
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
Several 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).
Description
4 pages
Keywords
Personality structures, Individual differences, Factor structure, Culture, Language
Citation
Saucier G (2022) Intimations of a New Paradigm for Lexical Studies in Psychology. Front. Psychol. 13:867491. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867491