0.9 Trait theories of personality  (Page 7/41)

So now we turn our attention to traits , those special psychophysical systems that are at the center of Allport’s theory of personality. In 1936, Allport and Odbert had examined the 1925 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary and identified 17,953 words (4½ percent of the English language) that described aspects of distinctive and personal behavior that would commonly be described as traits (see Allport, 1937). Allport viewed a trait as both a form of readiness and a determining tendency. There are a number of other concepts that share some similarity with traits, such as habits , attitudes , needs , types , and instincts . In each case, however, these other forms of readiness to engage in certain responses or activities are different than traits, particularly with regard to their specificity and external focus or, as in the case of types, they describe a collection of correlated attributes. After describing the differences, Allport arrived at the following definition of a trait:

We are left with a concept of trait as a generalized and focalized neuropsychic system (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior . (pg. 295; Allport, 1937)

The essential aspect of this definition is equivalence, both perceptually and behaviorally. As the result of a trait, different stimuli are perceived as similar, and responded to in similar ways. This occurs regardless of the nature of the stimuli themselves. Suppose, for example, an individual is paranoid. If someone walks by and says “Hi, how are you today?” the paranoid individual might wonder “What is that supposed to mean? Why are they pretending to be so nice? What are they really up to?” As illogical as this response might seem, a paranoid trait has the ability to render even a simple hello as a threat.

Allport also made an important distinction between individual traits and common traits . Underlying this discussion was another important topic in Allport’s approach to psychology: the distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic approaches to studying psychology. As psychologists attempted to define their discipline as a scientific endeavor, they pursued a nomothetic approach, one that emphasizes general rules that apply to all. However, the psychology of personality that Allport was pursuing is inherently idiographic, an approach that emphasizes individuality. Strictly speaking, no two people can have exactly the same trait. Thus, all traits are inherently individual traits. However, this creates an extraordinary challenge for psychologists, both experimental psychologists who would measure traits and clinical psychologists who would describe an individual as possessing a certain trait (at some level) in order to provide a framework for communication and therapy. Allport agreed that is was logical to assume the existence of common traits, since normal people in a given culture would naturally tend to develop comparable modes of adjustment. However, Allport cautioned that developing clinical or experimental measures of such traits would at best be approximations of the individual traits present in each person (Allport, 1937, 1961).