Lexical studies of indigenous personality factors: Premises, products

Lexical Studies of Indigenous Personality

Factors: Premises, Products, and Prospects

Gerard SaucierUniversity of Oregon

Lewis R. GoldbergOregon Research Institute

ABSTRACT The rationale for lexical studies rests on the assumption that themost meaningful personality attributes tend to become encoded in language assingle-word descriptors. We articulate some key premises of the lexical approachand then review a number of studies that have been conducted examining thefactor structure of personality descriptors extracted from dictionaries. We com-pare lexical studies in English and 12 other languages, with attention to deline-ating consistencies between the structures found in diverse languages. Ourreview suggests that the Anglo-Germanic Big Five is reproduced better in somelanguages than in others. We propose some organizing rules for lexical factorstructures that may be more generalizable than the contemporary Big-Fivemodel. And, we propose several candidate structural models that should becompared with the Big Five in future studies, including structures with one, two,and three very broad factors, an alternative five-factor structure identified inItalian and Hungarian studies, and a seven-factor structure represented inHebrew and Philippine studies. We recommend that in future studies more

Work on this article was supported by Grant MH-49227 from the National Institute ofMental Health, U.S. Public Health Service.

Correspondence may be addressed to either of the two authors: Gerard Saucier,Department of Psychology, 1227 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA(E-mail: [email protected]); or Lewis R. Goldberg, Oregon Research Insti-tute, 1715 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403-1983 (E-mail: [email protected]).

Journal of Personality 69:6, December 2001.Copyright © 2001 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

attention be paid to middle-level personality constructs and to examining theeffects of methodological variations on the resulting factor structures.

Lexical studies of personality attributes have as their purpose the identi-fication of the most salient aspects of human personality, based onrepresentation of these aspects in the lexicon of a language. Althoughmost lexical studies focus on a single language, the approach affordsuseful comparisons between languages. In this article, we detail the keypremises of the lexical approach to studying personality attributes acrosscultures. We present a synopsis of research based on the lexical approach,and suggest implications from the pattern of results obtained in thesestudies.

Key Premises of the Lexical Approach

In a previously published chapter (Saucier & Goldberg, 1996b), wedescribed eight key premises of the lexical approach, as we conceive it.We focus on the applications to personality, although the approach isbeginning to be applied to other fields (e.g., Saucier, 2000b; Schmitt &Buss, 2000).

1. Personality language refers to phenotypes and not genotypes. Person-descriptive predicates refer to observable (surface) characteristics ratherthan underlying (causal) properties. As a result, the language of person-ality can provide a framework for description, but not necessarily forexplanation. Moreover, the lexical approach cannot be considered a formof “trait theory” since it makes no a priori assumption that the phenotypicattributes encoded in language are stable ones.

2. Important phenotypic attributes become encoded in the naturallanguage. Both Cattell (1943, 1957) and Norman (1967) stated thispremise explicitly: As phenotypic attributes are seen as worthy of notice,words for the attributes appear and are maintained by frequent use. As aresult, personality concepts in everyday use inevitably form a substantialpart of the subject matter of personality psychology. The scientific studyof personality, even if it reveals errors in lay use of these concepts, willalways have to relate back to such folk concepts (Hampson, 1994). Andscientific concepts often evolve from folk concepts. For example, folkconcepts, such as height, weight, volume, and age, provide basic but not

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exhaustive (necessary but not sufficient) components for a science ofphysical differences. Similarly, folk concepts of personality providebasic but not exhaustive (necessary but not sufficient) components for ascience of personality attributes.

3. The degree of representation of an attribute in language has somecorrespondence with the general importance of the attribute. “In lan-guage” can mean either “across languages” or “within a language.”Imagine a phenotypic personality attribute for which there is a corre-sponding concept found in virtually any language; such an attributewould have a major claim to importance in a pancultural sense. Imagineanother attribute for which there is, within one language, a dense clusterof loosely synonymous terms; such an attribute would also have a majorclaim to importance, at least with respect to the language communitywithin whose language it is so richly represented (Zipf, 1949). Attributesthat are represented by multiple terms in a language should appear asfactors in multivariate analyses; if the terms are used with high frequency,the importance of the factor is underscored. Finding such factors requiresan indigenous, or “emic,” research strategy; analyses are carried outseparately within each language using native descriptors alone, ratherthan by importing “etic” selections of variables from other languages(e.g., English).

4. The lexical perspective provides an unusually strong rationale forthe selection of variables in personality research. A virtually infinitenumber of sentence-length personality questionnaire items can be con-structed. With so many potential variables, how could one make a strongclaim to the representativeness or comprehensiveness of the constructsin a personality measure? How could one know when one is using abiased selection of variables? Because there are a limited number ofsingle terms that refer to personality in any language, one can more easilyargue that a selection of variables is actually representative of some largerpopulation of variables (cf. Peabody, 1987). Such arguments provide oneway of defining content validity for personality measures. Heavily usedpredicates in the natural language are a powerful indicator of salientpsychological phenomena.

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5. Person-description and the sedimentation of important differences inlanguage both work primarily through the adjective function. Adjectivalconcepts describe properties of an object and distinguish between mem-bers of the same species (Dixon, 1977). Lehmann (1994) notes thatproperty-denoting predicates are the distinct province of adjectives inlanguages that have adjectives, but can also be represented in nouns andverbs. As an example, consider the following three related descriptionsin English: He is drunk (adjective), He is a drunk (noun), He’s beendrinking (verb). Because the adjective function does not necessarilyrequire adjectives, studies using the lexical approach should not neces-sarily limit themselves to adjectives. Some concepts may be representedmainly, or only, in nouns or verbs.

6. The structure of person-descriptions in phrases and sentences isclosely related to that based on single words. Single terms often func-tion holophrastically, incorporating complex ideas normally expressedin sentences. A set of single terms administered as descriptive stimuligenerates implied sentences (e.g., “Courageous” implying “I am typi-cally courageous”), in effect controlling for the various forms of condi-tionals, contextualizations, and specifications that are found inpersonality questionnaire items. The language of personality can beunderstood as a semantic hierarchy consisting of words and phrases atdifferent levels of abstraction versus specification (John, Hampson, &Goldberg, 1991). Single terms (e.g., Sociable) are at a broader, moreabstract level in this hierarchy than are the specific predicates (e.g., Likesparties) typically found among personality questionnaire items. It is notsurprising, then, that analyses of a large number of diverse personalityscales seem to generate much the same factor structure as those based onthe higher-level single terms. On the other hand, we expect that person-ality factors sparsely represented in any language, like “Openness toExperience” (McCrae, 1990; but see Saucier, 1992) are more likely to beculture-bound than are lexical personality factors.

7. The science of personality differs from other disciplines in ways thatmake the lexical perspective particularly germane in this scientificcontext, yet not in others. Physics, chemistry, and physiology provideconcepts that diffuse into common speech, but nowadays these sciencesdo not base themselves on concepts encoded in natural languages. Butthe science of personality is different. Atoms, chemical elements, stars,


and bodily organs do not communicate with each other through themedium of language; if they did, scientists would certainly want to studythe concepts in their language. Personality psychology is concerned withthe behavior of social species— in the human case a highly linguisticspecies—and not of mute, inanimate objects. Personality involves so-cially meaningful behavior patterns that tend to become represented inlanguage.

8. The most important dimensions in aggregated personality judg-ments are the most invariant and universal dimensions—those thatreplicate across samples of targets, targets of description, and variationsin analytic procedures, as well as across languages. The lexical ap-proach can be employed to locate patterns of person perception idiosyn-cratic to certain types of samples, targets of description, and languages.In this respect it is highly compatible with the research goals of culturalpsychology (Shweder, 1999). However, in any science, patterns ofgreater generality are given greater emphasis, and the lexical approachcan be harnessed toward the scientific goals of comprehensiveness,parsimony, and replication. Moreover, discovery of nomothetic trends(across cultures) can enable clearer identification of idiographic patterns(within culture). The lexical approach might be used to identify a set ofubiquitous factors in personality description—that is, relatively invariantfactors generated from independent emic studies in many languages(Goldberg, 1981).1

The Search for Ubiquitous Lexical Dimensions

The Big Five is commonly proffered as a candidate for a set of ubiquitouslexical dimensions. This model includes five factors—usually labeledExtraversion (I), Agreeableness (II), Conscientiousness (III), Emotional

1. The hypothesis of ubiquitous lexical dimensions can be stated in two separable forms.First, factors of a specific nature (factor axes located in specific sets of variables) couldreplicate across structures indigenous to various languages. Alternatively, a descriptivehypersphere or “space” of a certain dimensionality (e.g., three dimensions) couldreplicate across languages; this form is more liberal with respect to rotational algorithmsand indeed would allow the use of factors that have not been rotated at all. Lexical studiesto date have usually emphasized the first form, but some studies (Di Blas & Forzi, 1999;Hofstee, De Raad, & Goldberg, 1992; Peabody & Goldberg, 1989; Saucier, 1992a,2000a; Saucier, Peabody, & Ostendorf, 2001) have stressed the second.

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Stability (IV), and Intellect (V)—that were most clearly identified instudies of the related languages of English (Goldberg, 1990; Saucier &Goldberg, 1996a) and German (Ostendorf, 1990). After its identificationin early lexical studies, this Big Five has formed the template for a highlyinfluential personality inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992).So far, this Big Five is the most widely tested structure in lexical studiesof indigenous personality factors.

Cross-language studies of the five-factor framework have used bothetic (imported) and emic (indigenous) procedures (Berry, 1969). In theformer, an imported (usually Western) framework is tried out in the newculture to see how well it fits (e.g., a Big-Five measure is translated intoanother language to see whether people in the new language communitycan employ the dimensions). In contrast, emic approaches permit theindigenous framework to emerge without imposing constraints (e.g., arepresentative sample of the language’s person-descriptive adjectives isanalyzed). In most lexical studies, investigators use an emic approach toidentify the indigenous factors of personality description, and then usean etic measure to compare these dimensions with ones found in otherlanguages. The present review is focused only on emic studies and thusdoes not include studies primarily designed to develop measures of theEnglish Five-Factor Model in another language (e.g., Benet-Martinez &John, 1998; McCrae & Costa, 1997). For an earlier review of thisliterature, the reader is referred to a chapter by Saucier, Hampson, andGoldberg (2000).

Emic lexical research studies have been conducted to date in over adozen languages. The method of choice for these emic studies is explora-tory factor analysis (EFA), which seeks the optimized structure “indige-nous” to a data set. Unfortunately, results of EFAs that have used bothdiffering sets of variables and differing samples of subjects are difficultto compare. Use of imported markers is a standard remedy, but there aretwo key limitations of this otherwise praiseworthy strategy : (a) it is notclear which reference structure (e.g., version of the Big Five) should beimported, and (b) in cross-language comparisons the necessity of ade-quately translating these markers is a complicating element. Confirma-tory factor-analytic approaches, which could provide the opportunity totest the generalizability of many reference structures, are severely limitedby the difficulty of finding large subsets of widely translatable terms.And, in any case, correlations between sets of broad factors may provideinsufficient descriptive information on how factors are similar and


different from each other. Factors are ways of grouping variables, and itwould be instructive to examine a set of specific subcomponents or“clusters” making up the broad factors, to see how the grouping of theseclusters into factors is similar or different from one language to another.We conjecture that the theme represented in a cluster is likely to transferbetter between languages than will a single word, which often hasmultiple denotations and connotations.

A Framework for Comparing Factor Structures

In this review, we will refer to the set of clusters depicted in Figure 1.Most of these clusters are derived from a study identifying subcompo-nents of the Big Five that generalized well between German and English-language lexical data sets (Saucier & Ostendorf, 1999). The clusters from

Figure 1Person-descriptive facets used in reviewing lexical studies

(dotted lines indicate Anglo-Germanic Big Five groupings of thesefacts where these groupings are unambiguous; ungrouped facets

are those that tend most strongly to be ‘blends’).

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that study are supplemented by (a) a few adaptations of those utilized byPeabody and De Raad (2000) to analyze content differences betweenfive-factor solutions derived from six European languages, and (b) someclusters apparent in studies that have included a wider selection ofvariables. The set of clusters in Figure 1 is not proposed as final orauthoritative, but only as an heuristically useful one, given the studies todate.2

We will examine the extent to which one can form general rules abouthow the clusters in Figure 1 group into factors in one language versusanother. Our review owes a significant debt to the detailed review ofPeabody and De Raad (2000). Our review, like that of Peabody and DeRaad, does rely heavily on English translations of terms from otherlanguages; we would welcome refined interpretations more carefullyattentive to the meanings of native terms.

To simplify our review, we will state in advance a few empiricallyinduced rules about the ways that these clusters have grouped into factorsin published lexical studies to date.

Rule 1. If only one factor is extracted, the favorable poles of all theclusters are aligned in the same direction. This unrotated factor canbe labeled Evaluation—the contrast between socially desirable andundesirable qualities. Rule 1 is akin to the well-known finding(Osgood, May, & Miron, 1975) that, in judgments about diverseobjects using semantic differential scales from a wide array ofcultural settings, a global evaluation factor is the single largestfactor.

Rule 2. If two factors are extracted and rotated, the clusters inFigure 1 tend to split diagonally. The upper and left clusters dividefrom the lower and right clusters, yielding two separate groupings.Candidate labels for these factors are Dynamism and SocialPropriety (Saucier, 2000); the “dynamism” label is also derivedfrom Osgood’s work, where it indicated a combination of Activityand Potency. Social Propriety (or Socialization) reflects a set of

2. The clusters in the far right and far left of Figure 1 may be correlated with one another,as may be those in the far top and far bottom of the figure. Representations like those inFigure 1 might be statistically formalized via graph-theoretic approaches, but suchformalization is beyond the scope of this article.


favorably evaluated attributes that are not extreme in either activityor potency.

Rule 3. If three factors are extracted and rotated, these factorsapproximate a Big Three—broad versions of Extraversion,Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. This rule may need tobe limited to data consisting of ratings of persons by others,rather than self-ratings where it seems to apply with less thanperfect consistency.

Rule 4. As more factors are extracted, groupings are formed suchthat no rotated factor includes a combination of any two of thefollowing: (a) Sociability (Gregariousness), (b) Warmth andGenerosity, (c) Orderliness and Industriousness, and (d) Anxiety-Fearfulness. These appear to be the most cross-language gener-alizable nuclei of the factors that emerge as more factors areretained—as few as four or as many as eight, depending on thelanguage and the variable selection. (The four key clusters areshaded in Figure 1.) However, the particular additional clusters thatare associated with each of these four mutually independent clustersvaries considerably between languages and between studies.

Rule 5. An additional factor is found (among the first seven ex-tracted and rotated) that includes at least one of the followingclusters: Intellect, Imagination, or Unconventionality. The “or”makes this a permissive rule. There is apparently no consensual corefor this factor across languages, although the clusters involved (likeOpenness to Experience) all appear to be attributes more distinctlyemphasized and valued in modern individualistic societies than inother cultures.

Rule 6. To the extent that a substantial number of relevant variablesare included and as many as seven factors are retained, a separatefactor including the Negative Valence items will be found. This rulemust be stated somewhat tentatively because only a minority ofstudies have included relevant variables. An unresolved issue is themeaning of high versus low scores on Negative Valence (e.g., is ita kind of “infrequency” scale?). In addition, under wide variable-selection conditions, an Attractiveness factor might also be found,but an even smaller number of studies have included the relevantvariables.

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The studies we describe indicate that these rules appear to be moregeneralizable than the Big-Five structure found in English and German(the “Anglo-Germanic Big Five” or AGB5): Studies that have generatedwidely different five-factor structures have still conformed to theseorganizing rules.

The following synopsis of studies does not include ongoing projectsfor which reports are not yet published; for example, lexical studies arepresently being carried out in French, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian,Croatian, Greek, Chinese, Norwegian, and Slovak. Our review includesonly studies that carried out variable selection from a lexicon (diction-ary). We classify the studies and languages reviewed into two groups,based on their five-factor solutions: Those with (a) an Anglo-GermanicBig-Five pattern of grouping the clusters in Figure 1, and (b) an alterna-tive pattern with Agreeableness subdivided into two large factors. We willseparately consider those studies that employed very wide variable-selection conditions.

Group 1: Studies with Structures Resembling theAnglo-Germanic Big Five Studies in English

Norman (1967) extracted person-descriptive terms from a newer editionof the same unabridged English dictionary that Allport and Odbert (1936)had used in an earlier study. Norman’s research team refined the 18,125extracted terms by excluding those classified as pure evaluations and asphysical and medical terms and categorizing the remainder as (a) stabletraits, (b) temporary states and activities, or (c) social roles, relationships,and effects. Through this process, Norman identified a basic set of roughly2,800 stable trait terms. Goldberg (1976, 1982) reduced Norman’s stable-trait pool to 1,710 by eliminating the least commonly used terms and thosethat seemed the least dispositional in nature. Using these same criteria,Goldberg later developed a 540-term set that was employed in a numberof studies in which university students described themselves and others(Goldberg, 1990); these studies gave evidence of a replicable Big-Fivestructure from clusters formed from these descriptors.3 Subsequently,

3. The data used in this study were ipsatized: Each respondent’s ratings were Z-scored,giving each case a mean of 0 and a variance of 1. Ipsatization removes individualdifferences in response-scale usage that may be due to acquiescence or extremeness vs.moderacy responding. A potential disadvantage of ipsatizing is that differences between


Saucier and Goldberg (1996a) analyzed the most familiar subset of435 adjectives in a combined sample of over 500 self descriptions andnearly 400 descriptions of others, and found a five-factor structure thatresembled those from earlier studies. In Factor I (Extraversion), Asser-tiveness, Adventurousness, and Confidence blended with Sociability. InFactor II (Agreeableness), Gentleness and Humility blended withWarmth and Generosity. In Factor III (Conscientiousness), Consistency/Stability and Dependability blended with Orderliness and Industrious-ness. In Factor IV (Emotional Stability), Irritability (reversed) blendedwith Anxiety/Fearfulness (reversed). Finally, Intellect and Imaginationformed Factor V. Some Clusters—Unconventionality (III-/V+), Percep-tiveness (III+/V+), and Persistence (I/III)—were found in the intersticesbetween the factors, and yet other clusters (Negative Valence, PositiveValence, and Attractiveness) were represented too insufficiently to beconsidered.

Not all lexical studies in English have, however, led to the same precisegroupings. Peabody (1987) developed 53 bipolar scales to represent alarge pool of adjectives that included Goldberg’s 540 terms. Four collegestudents made judgments of semantic similarity between all of the termsfrom each pole and each of the bipolar scales. Analyses of these judg-ments of “internal structure” revealed the Big-Five factors, plus a small“Values” factor. The first three factors (Assertiveness [Extraversion],Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) were, however, much larger thanthe remaining ones. Although further analyses of these bipolar scales inself- and peer descriptions consistently found the Big-Five factors(Peabody & Goldberg, 1989), the first three factors (i.e., Extraversion [I],Agreeableness [II], and Conscientiousness [III]) remained substantiallylarger than the other two (Emotional Stability [IV] and Intellect [V]). Interms of Figure 1, Irritability was grouped with II- rather than IV-, and

respondents in mean or variance may represent in part valid differences (e.g., somepeople may have more extreme traits, or happen to score validly higher on the traitsindicated). Ipsatizing is discussed in detail by ten Berge (1999). All studies described inthe following review involved ipsatized data, with these exceptions: (a) Peabody’s (1987;Peabody & Goldberg, 1989) studies in English that employed bipolar scales, (b) thestudies of Dutch nouns and verbs by De Raad and his colleagues (e.g., De Raad &Hoskens, 1990; De Raad, Mulder, Kloosterman, & Hofstee, 1988; De Raad & Ostendorf,1996), and (c) Saucier’s (2000a) studies of eight American data sets that used both rawand ipsatized data sets, and in some cases bipolar scales. Di Blas and Forzi (1999)indicated their results were similar in either raw or ipsatized data.

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Persistence with III, while the secondary associations of Intellect andImagination with factors other than V increased. The sixth “Values”factor relates to Integrity/Sincerity in Figure 1.

The comparative replicability of factor solutions based on Englishadjectives was further examined by Saucier (2000a), who combined eightAmerican samples (total N = 3,062) with variable selections emphasizing“stable dispositional” personality attributes. He found that structures ofone, two, and three factors were all more replicable than five-factorstructures; their superior replicability was especially evident in peer-rating samples. The factors in the three-factor structure closely resembledthe first three of the Big Five. Smaller fourth and fifth factors, independentof these first three, were identified with Anxiety (Anxiety/Fearfulness inFigure 1)and Autonomous Intellectuality (combining Intellect and Uncon-ventionality from Figure 1).

Studies in German

Lexical studies have a long genealogy in Germany. Klages (1932) articu-lated the lexical rationale, and Baumgarten (1933) created the first list ofGerman personality descriptors, both of which influenced the work ofAllport and Odbert (1936). In the 1980s, Angleitner, Ostendorf, and John(1990) extracted 5,101 personality-relevant adjectives (e.g., cynical),2,212 type nouns (e.g., cynic), and 3,607 attribute nouns (e.g., cynicism)from a comprehensive dictionary and supplementary lexical sources.Judges classified the adjectives into five broad and 13 subordinatecategories, a now widely used refinement of Norman’s (1967) categorysystem.

Ostendorf (1990) studied 430 German adjectives that had been classi-fied as either “temperament and character traits” or “abilities and talents.”Over 400 adult participants completed self-reports using the 430 adjec-tives and measures of the Big Five, and 95% of those individuals weredescribed by from one to three acquaintances. Analyses of the 430adjectives generated five highly replicable factors in ratings of either selfor acquaintances. Correlations of these factors with the correspondingfactors from the American-English Big Five averaged over .70 (seeOstendorf & Angleitner, 1994, Table 1). Included in Figure 1 is anindication of which clusters have the most consistent associations witheach of the Anglo-Germanic Big Five.


In terms of Figure 1, the German factors resembled those from Englishin Saucier and Goldberg (1996a), except that Factor IV was smaller(Irritability associated with II), and Factor V included Competence/Talent descriptors. The three-factor solutions (resembling the Big Three;Saucier, Ostendorf, & Peabody, in press) were at least as replicable asthose with five factors.4

Studies in Polish and Czech

Polish and Czech are both Slavic languages.5 In a study by Szarota(1996; Szarota & Ostendorf, 1997), two judges extracted 1,811 person-descriptive adjectives from a Polish dictionary; to this set were addeda further 28 terms taken from other lists of Polish personality descriptors.Ten judges then rated these 1,839 terms for clarity of meaning andpersonality relevance, and classified them using the system developed byAngleitner, Ostendorf, and John (1990). Of these 1,839 terms, the 290adjectives categorized as dispositions were used for self- and peer ratingsin a sample of 369 high-school students. In both the self- and the peerratings, five factors similar to the AGB5 factors could be identified. Thereview of Peabody and De Raad (2000) suggests that Emotional Stability(IV) was concentrated on Irritability rather than Anxiety/ Fearfulnesscontent, but it is not clear that much Anxiety/Fearfulness content wasincluded in the variable selection.

Hrebícková, Ostendorf, and Angleitner (1995) provided a preliminaryreport on a lexical analysis of Czech adjectives. Four thousand onehundred forty-five potentially personality relevant terms were extractedfrom a standard Czech dictionary. Those 366 terms that the majority ofjudges classified as dispositions (using the German system) were ratedfor self-descriptiveness by 397 persons. Factor solutions with five andmore factors were examined and interpreted both by inspection of the

4. In raw-data analyses in German, an Emotional Stability factor did not appear until atleast six factors were extracted and rotated; in the raw-data five-factor solutions,Agreeableness was split into two factors, labeled SD- (low social desirability) and“Warmherzigkeit” (Warm-heartedness) (Ostendorf, 1990, p. 178). Only at the three-factor level were all factor-comparability coefficients for both ipsatized and raw dataabove .90.5. Studies in Russian (see Shmelyov & Pokhil′ko, 1993) used exclusively judgmentsabout concepts rather than about people, and did not report five-factor solutions, makingcomparability with the other studies reviewed here difficult.

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high-loading terms and by correlations with expert prototypicality ratingswith respect to the Big Five. The grouping of clusters into factorsresembled those in the AGB5, although the Czech version of EmotionalStability was broad and was related also to Agreeableness and Intellectwhen correlated with the prototypicality indices for these factors.

Studies in Turkish

The Turkish language, a member of the Altaic group, was studied bySomer and Goldberg (1999; Goldberg & Somer, 2000). Five nativespeakers culled 2,200 person-descriptive adjectives from three modernabridged Turkish dictionaries. Most terms describing physical attributes,sheer evaluations, and slang terms were removed; the remaining1,300 terms were judged for familiarity as personality descriptors by150 university students. Studies were conducted with different subsetsof the most familiar of these 1,300 terms.

Somer and Goldberg’s (1999) Study 1 used 474 familiar adjectivesgrouped into 358 synonym clusters and arranged as 179 pairs ofantonym clusters. Ratings of self, liked peers, and disliked peers wereobtained for both poles of the antonym clusters from 232 universitystudents. Two-, three-, four-, five-, six-, and seven-factor solutionswere examined. Analyses of the self and liked targets produced asolution that resembled the AGB5, whereas analyses of the liked plusdisliked peers produced a five-factor solution in which the fifth factorappeared as a blend of Openness-Imagination with Attractiveness. Thethree-factor solution in both cases produced a recognizable Big Three.In Study 2, the 358 terms were reduced to a smaller set of 235, andself and peer ratings were obtained from a much larger sample(945 university students); roughly half of the sample described them-selves, and the other half described either liked, disliked, or neutrallyevaluated peers. Solutions for one to seven factors were obtained. Incombined self and liked peer targets or among combined peer targets,the five-factor solution resembled the German lexical Big-Five solu-tions in particular, but with Factor V closer to Openness than Intellect.For both sets of ratings, the three-factor solution reproduced the BigThree.

Goldberg and Somer (2000) conducted a follow-up study. When theitem pool was restricted to terms that were less pejorative and more


clearly related to personality traits, Big-Five factors were obtained, withagain the fifth factor blending Intellect with Unconventionality.6

The Turkish studies demonstrate that the AGB5 can be reproduced inan emic study in a non-Indo-European language, at least under threeconditions: (a) ipsatized ratings are employed, (b) more latitude forvariability of content is allowed for Factor V, and (c) the language-community has experienced some degree of Westernization. The Turkishsamples consisted of university students in a nation where these are asmall minority of the adult population.

Studies in Dutch

Lexical studies in Dutch were carried out by Brokken (1978) and Hofstee(Hofstee, Brokken, & Land, 1981), with further data and analysesprovided by De Raad, Hendriks, and Hofstee (1992). In the originalstudies, 8,690 person-descriptive adjectives were extracted from a largedictionary, and then reduced to 6,055 terms that were judged by at leastone of four individuals to be stable traits. At a later stage of the project,those 1,203 adjectives that fit best into key sentence stems (“He/she is____ by nature”; “What kind of person is he/she? _____”) were retained.Using the 1,203 adjectives, 200 pairs of university students who kneweach other well rated both themselves and their partners (Brokken, 1978).Later, De Raad (1992) collected 200 additional self-ratings from univer-sity students on 551 of the 1,203 adjectives selected by more stringentuse of the same criteria used by Brokken. Ratings of these 600 partici-pants (400 self, 200 acquaintance) were pooled in a factor analysis of the551 adjectives; four, five, and six factors were rotated. In each of thesesolutions, the first four factors could be identified with Extraversion (I),

6. When raw-data instead of ipsatized ratings were analyzed in this study of Turkishdescriptors, a Big Five structure could not be identified, due to the fusion of aspects ofExtraversion and Intellect into a single factor (probably related to Dynamism, Self-Assurance, Assertiveness, and Positive Valence factors found in other lexical studies)beginning at the two-factor level. The raw-data five-factor solution included this Dyna-mism factor, plus factors that might be labeled Social Propriety, Unpleasant Affect,Conscientiousness, and Emotionality; the two-factor solution included the first two ofthese, and the three-factor solution the first three of these. Thus, the raw-data analysesin the second study supported neither the Big Five nor the Big Three, but did find atwo-factor structure resembling that in analyses of descriptors from other languages (e.g.,Saucier, 2000a).

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Agreeableness (II), Conscientiousness (III), and Emotional Stability (IV)from the AGB5.

In terms of Figure 1, the Dutch five-factor solution featured a largeFactor II as in German, but more narrow versions of Factor I (primarilySociability) and Factor III (primarily Orderliness and Dependability),and an especially broad Factor IV (including Consistency/Stability,Persistence, and Confidence contrasted with Anxiety/Fearfulness). Thefifth factor in this solution contrasted intellectual autonomy and inde-pendence with conventionality; it combined the Figure 1 clusters ofImagination, Unconventionality, and at least in part Assertiveness andPerceptiveness.

Dutch is a Germanic language highly related to both German andEnglish, and we might expect lexical studies in these three languages tosuggest a similar indigenous structure. Hofstee, Kiers, De Raad, Gold-berg, and Ostendorf (1997) compared Dutch, English, and GermanBig-Five structures and concluded that the Big Five replicated acrossthese three quite similar Germanic languages, although the degree ofequivalence was not perfect. The greatest inconsistencies were found inFactor V.

De Raad and his colleagues have pioneered the application of thelexical approach to personality-type nouns (De Raad & Hoskens, 1990;De Raad & Ostendorf, 1996) and personality-relevant verbs (De Raad,Mulder, Kloosterman, & Hofstee, 1988). Some of the noun factors(labeled “Malignity”) are reminiscent of Negative Valence from the BigSeven. The verb studies led to a two-factor representation, with (a) onefactor defined by verbs like “Care [for]” and “Cooperate” (versus“Curse” and “Threaten”), and (b) the other factor defined by verbs like“Decide” and “Lead” (versus “Flee” and “Brood”). These verb factorswere correlated, respectively, with (a) Big-Five Agreeableness and Con-scientiousness, and (b) Big-Five Intellect (Autonomy in this Dutch case),Extraversion, and Emotional Stability. How generalizable are these twoverb factors? Hrebícková et al. (1999) studied the structure of Czechpersonality-relevant verbs. The two-factor solution was similar to theDutch two-factor verb structure, consistent with our Rule 2.

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Group 2: Studies With TwoAgreeableness-Related Factors

Studies in Italian

Two independent taxonomic projects were conducted in Italy—the“Roman” project of Caprara and Perugini (1994) and the “Trieste”project of Di Blas and Forzi (1998, 1999). Despite methodologicaldifferences, these two studies led to structures having some similarity(De Raad, Di Blas, & Perugini, 1998); an interesting commonality is thatthese structures divide the Big Five’s unitary Agreeableness factor intotwo factors.

In Rome (Caprara & Perugini, 1994), an abridged dictionary wasscanned for person-descriptive adjectives and 8,532 were selected. Rat-ings of utility for describing personality, first by four experts and then by22 lay judges, were used to reduce the number of terms to 492; theseterms were administered to 274 research participants for self-ratings. Thefive-factor solution from analyses of these data included Big-Five Ex-traversion [I] and Conscientiousness [III] factors, with clusters groupedmuch as in the German studies. A third factor was labeled Quietness [orPeacefulness] versus Irritability. A fourth factor, labeled Selfishnessversus Altruism, included adjectives related to tough-mindedness andemotionality, as well as Warmth, Generosity, and Integrity/Sincerity. Thefifth factor, labeled Conventionality, included descriptors related to con-formity and traditionalism, resembling the fifth factor in Dutch.

In Trieste (Di Blas & Forzi, 1998), five judges extracted 11,010person-descriptive terms from an unabridged Italian dictionary. Adjec-tives (3,780) and the adjectives that can be used as type-nouns (1,428)were further scrutinized. The 1,586 most personality-relevant, frequentlyused, and least ambiguous of these terms (as determined by ratings by10 or more students) were classified by university students into the13 categories of the German system. A set of 314 prototypically dispo-sitional adjectives was administered to a heterogeneous sample of 427 in-dividuals for self-ratings and another sample of 277 secondary schoolstudents for ratings of someone they knew well. The two data sets wereanalyzed both separately and jointly, with three- to nine-factor solutionsbeing examined. Self- and other ratings produced comparable three-factor solutions that were similar to Big-Five Factors I, II, and III (a BigThree). In the five-factor solutions, Extraversion and Agreeableness eachsplit into a pair of more specific factors (Assertiveness and Sociability;

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Quietness [or Peacefulness] and Tender-mindedness). There was nosingle “Emotional Stability” factor: Aspects of Fearfulness were associ-ated with the negative pole of Assertiveness, and aspects of Irritabilitywere associated with the negative pole of “Quietness.” No factor resem-bling “Intellect” emerged until at least seven factors were rotated.

Subsequently, Di Blas and Forzi (1999) attempted to replicate thisstructure in a study of self-ratings from 369 participants using a set of369 terms, including some adjectives that can be used as type-nouns andexcluding terms with very skewed response distributions. Again thefive-factor solution failed to yield the AGB5, whereas the three-factorsolution yielded a Big Three.

Findings from the two Italian projects differ from each other withregard to the nature of the Extraversion factor and the identification of afactor comparable to Big Five Intellect. However, in both Italian studies,Agreeableness split into two distinct factors: One factor (Altruism,Tender-mindedness) included the Warmth, Generosity, and Integrity/Sincerity clusters from Figure 1, and the other (“Quietness”) includedthe Humility, Gentleness, and (reversed) Irritability clusters.

Studies in Hungarian

Szirmák and De Raad (1994) reported the findings from lexical studiesin Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language. Over 8,000 person descriptorswere extracted from dictionaries. The 624 trait-descriptive adjectiveswith the highest mean ratings (from five judges) on familiarity,personality-relevance, and stability (trait versus state) were retained.Self-ratings on 561 of these 624 terms were provided by 400 universitystudents. Three-, four-, five-, and six-factor solutions were examined (DeRaad & Szirmák, 1994). The three-factor solution resembled a Big Three.In the four-factor solution, the factors resembled AGB5 Extraversion (I),Agreeableness (II), Conscientiousness (III), and Emotional Stability(IV). In the five-factor solution, Agreeableness divided into two factors,one (labeled Agreeableness) emphasizing Irritability, and the other (la-beled Integrity) emphasizing variables apparently related to the Humility(vs. Egotism) and Integrity/Sincerity clusters in Figure 1. The six-factorsolution added an Intellect factor. The similarities to the Italian structureshave been noted by De Raad (2000). As in these structures, Agreeablenessvariables were split into two factors in the five-factor solution.


Studies in Korean

A study of Korean (Hahn, Lee, & Ashton, 1999) generated results thatfit partly into Group 1, and partly into Group 2, depending on whetherthe five- or six-factor structure is examined. The investigators obtainedterms from two dictionaries, as well as from personality descriptionswritten by university students. Physical attributes, evaluations, and tem-porary states were excluded, as well as some synonyms of the includedterms, resulting in about 1,000 terms; these were reduced to 785 basedon four judges’ ratings of familiarity and adequacy for describing per-sonality. The 785 were rated for frequency of use by 125 universitystudents, and 406 of high familiarity were selected. Undergraduates(N = 435) from three Korean universities rated themselves on these 406terms. Three- to seven-factor solutions were examined and correlatedwith Korean Big-Five factors (from 46 Korean markers) to assist in theirinterpretation.

The Korean three-factor solution reproduced a Big Three. In thefour-factor solution, the Korean emic factors were labeled Extraversion(correlating .91 with Big-Five Extraversion), Agreeableness (correlating.87 with Big-Five Agreeableness), Conscientiousness/Precision (relatedto both Big-Five Conscientiousness and Intellect), and Masculinity/Emotional Stability. This latter factor (correlating .79 with Big-FiveEmotional Stability markers including a term translated as “Masculine”)included a number of gender-related terms (e.g., Manly, Feminine), alongwith those reflecting self-efficacy or potency (e.g., Strong, Weak); itcould represent a combination of the Persistence, Confidence, Assertive-ness, and (reversed) Anxiety/Fearfulness clusters in Figure 1. If so, itwould uphold the “four mutually independent clusters” rule. In thefive-factor solution, the Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Masculinity/Emotional Stability factors remained much the same, whereas instead ofConscientiousness/Precision there was a Methodical Intellect factor anda second factor (also related to Conscientiousness) emphasizing Depend-ability; by loose standards, this solution resembles the AGB5. Thesix-factor solution produced a factor labeled Truthfulness that the inves-tigators judged to be similar to the Integrity factor identified in Hungarian(Szirmák & De Raad, 1994). The investigators concluded that the Koreanpersonality factors were quite similar to the Big Five, but clearly therewere many divergences from the AGB5, both with respect to the axislocations of several factors and to the blends of clusters in Figure 1. And

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as in the other Group 2 studies, Agreeableness clusters were found ontwo different factors in the six-factor solution.

Studies Utilizing a Wider Selection of Variables

The studies we have already cited restricted themselves to terms for“stable dispositional” personality attributes (excluding most states, socialevaluations, and physical and appearance characteristics). In this sectionwe review studies that cast a wider variable-selection net. We focus uponthe extent to which the findings from these studies bear on the organizingrules we inferred, and upon the extent to which each study seems to fitinto one of the Group 1 or Group 2 structures.

In a study by Tellegen and Waller (1987; summarized also by Waller& Zavala, 1993) of English descriptors, an abridged dictionary wasdivided into sections, and noncontiguous pages from each sectionwere randomly selected. On each selected page, the first adjective thatcould be fit into the stems “tends to be ____” and “is often ____”, orotherwise appeared to be person-descriptive, was extracted.7 A set of400 terms was selected, including terms describing social effects, pureevaluations, and temporary states, as well as stable traits. Self-reportsusing these 400 terms were provided by roughly 600 university stu-dents. Because many of these terms would be unfamiliar to most nativespeakers, participants were presented with portions of the dictionarydefinitions. Factor analyses (5 to 20 factors) of the 400 variables wereconducted, and a seven-factor solution was retained. The seven factorswere judged to correspond to the Big Five, plus orthogonal dimensionslabeled Positive Valence (e.g., Important, Outstanding) and NegativeValence (e.g., Evil, Vicious)—a “Big Seven.” The last two factorsdrew on the “pure evaluation” descriptors excluded in all previouslexical-factor studies. Because no report providing the item-by-itemcontent of these factors has been published, we cannot discuss thisstudy in more detail.

7. The inclusion of the phrase “tends to be” and the adverb “often” may serve to biasthe selection against attributes that are relatively nonfluctuating, such as those referringto physical attractiveness. If this hypothesis is correct, it might explain some of thedifferences between the “Positive Valence” factor found in this study and the “Attractive-ness” factor found by Saucier (1997).


We do not advocate the page-sampling method in this and other “BigSeven” studies (for a critique, see Saucier, 1997; Saucier, Hampson, &Goldberg, 2000). However, the inclusion of a wider range of variableswas an important innovation, as the next set of studies will suggest.

Studies Indicating Big Three Robustness Across Variable Selections

Saucier (1997) included the widest range of variables of any lexical studyto date. He found a structure resembling the AGB5 in a set of familiarEnglish adjectives restricted to dispositions and states. When a widerrange of terms, including social evaluations and physical attributes, wasincluded, two additional factors emerged (a) Attractiveness and (b) afactor resembling Negative Valence. Similarly, Goldberg and Somer(2000) administered the 498 most familiar single descriptor terms fromtheir initial set of 1,300 Turkish person-descriptive adjectives to over 600university students for self-ratings. In the total item pool, the AGB5factors were evident, along with a broad Attractiveness factor and another(Negative Valence) factor composed of items of extremely low endorse-ment rates—replicating Saucier (1997).

In both of these studies, whether one obtained the Big Five or therelated seven-factor structure depended upon the variable selection. Incontrast, in both studies a three-factor solution was replicable acrossvariable selections. These Big-Three factors (Extraversion, Agreeable-ness, and Conscientiousness) were each somewhat broader than thosefrom the AGB5, as in Peabody’s studies, Intellect and Imagination joinedthe Factor I grouping.8

The replicability of the Big Three across variable selections may beexemplified in a Spanish study that utilized page-sampling (Benet-Martinez & Waller, 1997). Every fourth page of a 1,666-page dictionary

8. It is important that readers understand that this “Big-Three” factor structure is notequivalent to the dimensions of Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism proposedby Eysenck (1991) as “basic super-factors.” In the two models, only Extraversion is thesame. Psychoticism has been shown to be a blend of the orthogonal Big Five Factors IIand III (Goldberg & Rosolack, 1994), whereas Neuroticism (the opposite pole of BigFive Emotional Stability) is not one of the “Big Three” lexical factors. However, in someself-report data with lexical variable selections, the three-factor solution may essentiallyconsist of Dynamism, Social Propriety (II and III), and something resembling Neuroti-cism (centered on Anxiety/Fearfulness content) if this content is well-represented enoughto saturate the third unrotated factor.

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was inspected and 299 adjectives were selected. The adjectives wereaccompanied by a synonym or short definition. Self-ratings were elicitedfrom a sample of 894 university students from Catalonia (Barcelona).Solutions of five to eight rotated factors were examined, and the seven-factor solution was emphasized. Correlations between the seven indige-nous factors and those from an imported Big Seven inventory werebetween .60 and .79 for “Pleasantness” (clearly centered on the Socia-bility cluster), broad versions of Conscientiousness (labeled “Temper-ance”) and Agreeableness, and Positive Valence (which also included theCompetence/Talent cluster). The other three indigenous factors weresubstantially smaller in size. One of them correlated moderately (.47)with Negative Valence markers, whereas the other two factors, labeledEngagement and Openness, had low correlations with the remainingimported factors. The five-factor solution did not yield a Big Five; itincluded Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Conventionality, and Nega-tive Valence factors, along with a large factor contrasting Positive Valenceand Positive Emotionality with Negative Emotionality (this appears toresemble Dynamism). In this Spanish study, the seven-factor solutionmight be seen as a replication of the Big Three, as well as Positive Valenceand (more weakly) Negative Valence. This structure probably fits betterinto Group 1 than Group 2 because there was a single broad Agreeable-ness factor. But there was no Emotional Stability factor as in the Group1 structure. Indeed, we wonder if Anxiety/Fearfulness is represented inany of these factors; if not, this would be at odds with our “four mutuallyindependent clusters” rule (Rule 4).

Hebrew and Filipino: Unexpected Convergence on a Seven-FactorStructure

Hebrew, a member of the Semitic language group, was studied byAlmagor, Tellegen, and Waller (1995) using page-sampling. Every fourthpage of a 1,600-page Hebrew dictionary was searched, extracting the firstpersonality-descriptive adjective, verb, or noun that was encountered.The resulting 326 terms were reduced to 252 after removing synonyms.University students (N = 637) used the 252 words (62% were adjectives)for self-ratings. The Hebrew factors labeled Agreeability (II) andDependability (III) were fairly similar to corresponding AGB5 factors.A Negative Valence factor was bipolar and unusually broad, apparentlyincluding content from the Integrity/Sincerity and Dependability clusters


from Figure 1. The terms with the highest loadings on a Positive Valencefactor were all related to Intellect (e.g., Sophisticated, Sharp, Knowledge-able). Anxiety/Fearfulness terms were found both on factors labeledPositive Emotionality/Agentic (e.g., Depressed, Sad) and Negative Emo-tionality (e.g., Bad-tempered, Angry; the Irritability cluster). The otherfactor, Positive Emotionality/Communal, included content highly relatedto Sociability (e.g., Likeable, Enthusiastic, Friendly, Talkative). Usingalternative labels, we might say this structure includes factors of Socia-bility (Gregariousness), Self-Assurance (vs. Depression), Irritability(Temperamentalness), Altruism (Concern for Others), Conscientious-ness, Intellect/Positive-Valence, and Negative Valence.

Only one native language of a Pacific Island or tropical region hasbeen examined in a lexical personality study. In the first lexical studyof an Austronesian language, Church, Katigbak, and Reyes (1996)searched a comprehensive Filipino dictionary. They extracted 6,900person-descriptive adjectives, which were classified using the Germansystem. The 682 most familiar and personality-relevant of these wereused for self-ratings by both college and high school students (Church,Reyes, Katigbak, & Grimm, 1997). Their preferred seven-factor solutionincluded factors labeled Gregariousness (the Sociability cluster), Con-cern for Others versus Egotism (most of the Agreeableness clusters),Conscientiousness (Orderliness and Industriousness plus low Unconven-tionality), Self-assurance (probably Assertiveness, Adventurousness,Confidence, and low Anxiety/Fearfulness), Intellect (Intellect plusCompetence/Talent), Negative Valence/Infrequency, and Temperamen-talness (identifiable with the Irritability cluster on Figure 1). When onlyfive factors were rotated, they were labeled Gregariousness, Egotism,Socialization, and Perceived Competence; a fifth Negative Valence factorwas composed entirely of pejorative terms.

In a replication study (Church, Katigbak, & Reyes, 1998), 740 Filipinocollege students provided self ratings using a revised set of 502 terms,which also included some highly desirable and highly undesirable terms.The students also rated themselves on translations of Big-Five markerscales. The seven-factor solution closely replicated that in the earlierstudy; Positive Valence markers (Big Seven) blended with terms relatedto Intellect and Competence/Talent to form a broader Factor V in thisrepresentation. The five rotated factors here were Gregariousness, Con-cern for Others, Conscientiousness, Perceived Competence (Intellect/Self-Assurance vs. Temperamentalness), and Negative Valence.

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With respect to the seven-factor structure preferred by their authors,the Filipino studies do support the “four mutually independent clusters”rule and also yield an Intellect factor. The clusters grouped with the fourkey clusters seem, however, quite dissimilar to the Anglo-Germanicgrouping pattern. Conscientiousness was a smaller factor than in otherstudies. As in Polish, Irritability content formed a factor separate fromother Agreeableness clusters. As in the Italian (Trieste) and Koreanstudies, the Sociability cluster was on a different factor than the Asser-tiveness, Adventurousness, and Confidence clusters.

The Filipino structure seems similar to the Hebrew structure. Thealternative labels for the seven Hebrew factors that we proposed are infact those used by Church et al. (1997, 1998) for their seven-factorstructure. The similarity of these two structures has perhaps gone unno-ticed due to the “jangle fallacy” (Kelley, 1927)—two things that are thesame carrying different labels. These two seven-factor structures seemmost related to our Group 2 structures: As in the Italian studies, therewere separate Altruism and Irritability factors. As in the Trieste study,the Sociability cluster anchored a separate factor from the other Extra-version clusters in Figure 1. Unlike the other Group 2 structures, however,there was a Negative Valence factor due in part to the wider variableselection. To some extent, the Hebrew and Filipino structures may be ahybrid of Group 1 and Group 2 structures. At any rate, Hebrew andFilipino are unrelated languages associated with different cultural con-texts, so the apparent structural convergence is worth noting.

Making Sense of the Findings

The Anglo-Germanic Big Five is the structure that has been most oftentested. The studies reviewed might be interpreted as indicating that theAnglo-Germanic model is most predictably replicable, in exploratoryfactor analyses representing indigenous structures, when all of the fol-lowing conditions are present: (a) the language has its origin in northernEurope,9 (b) the variable selection is (at least predominantly) limited todisposition-descriptive terms, and (c) the data consists of ipsatized self-ratings. The replicability of the Big Three does not seem contingent onthese conditions. A fairly consistent Big Three has been found in three-

9. It may be that utilizing university students with high exposure to Western—and especiallynorthern European and North American—culture is sufficient to create this condition.


factor solutions in English and Turkish (in these cases replicating acrossvariable selections) as well as German, Italian, Hungarian, and Korean—a wider scope of replication than has accrued to the Big Five. Is the BigThree superior to the Big Five?

There are three reasonable objections to a “ubiquitous Big-Three”hypothesis. First, the Big Three is, by necessity, less comprehensive thanthe Big Five; it omits whatever content is found in the fourth and fifthunrotated factors—representing the residual aspects of Emotional Sta-bility and Intellect that are uncorrelated with the Big Three. These twounrotated factors are presumably not as highly replicable across lan-guages, but their omission (within any language) restricts the behavioralreference of the Big Three relative to a five-factor structure. Second, thedegree of replication of the Big Three in variable selections that includenoun and verb descriptors is not yet clear. And third, it is not yet clearwhether three-factor structures always include a distinct Conscientious-ness factor. Thus, our Rule 3 needs wider tests.

The advantage of the Big Three over the Big Five is part of a largerpattern. The more terms that are associated with a particular factor, themore replicable should that factor be. By this principle, the most ubiqui-tous factor should be the first unrotated one. Unfortunately, only a fewlexical studies have characterized the one-factor structure in their data,so we cannot report as much support for Rule 1 as we suspect actuallyexists.

Two-factor solutions from several lexical studies also suggest a con-sistent pattern: One factor tends to involve attributes associated withdynamism and individual ascendancy, whereas the other tends to involveattributes associated with socialization, social propriety, solidarity, andcommunity (Di Blas & Forzi, 1999; Digman, 1997; Goldberg & Somer,2000; Hrebícková et al., 1999; Paulhus & John, 1998; Saucier, 1997,2000a; Shweder, 1972; White, 1980). The reproducibility of this two-factor solution (and our Rule 2) in diverse languages needs much moreattention.

Our Rule 4 specifies four mutually independent clusters (Sociability,Generosity and Warmth, Orderliness and Industriousness, and Anxiety/Fearfulness), but our review indicates that non-Big-Five structures (suchas those in our Group 2 studies, or in Hebrew or Filipino) can also beconsistent with this rule. Thus, Rule 4 seems to have wider applicationthan the Anglo-Germanic Big Five. However, Rule 4 is a much looserrule than Rules 1 to 3, which specify the character of all the factors in a

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solution. Rule 4 specifies only that the four key clusters are found onindependent factors in solutions with 4 to 8 factors—and there are manyimaginable sets of factors that might be consistent with this rule. Thelooseness of the rule speaks to the considerable diversity of structuresfound in lexical factors when more than three factors are extracted. Rule5 gives “or” options for Factor V and is thus also quite loose.

Even if the Anglo-Germanic version of a Big-Five structure is incom-pletely supported in studies of other languages, a considerable edifice ofconstruct validity has accrued around this model, an edifice that shouldnot be dismantled precipitously. Each of the five factors, for example,appears to reflect considerable genetic influences. It might also be arguedthat personality is usually assessed by means of questionnaire, andstudies of personality factors in questionnaires lend considerable supportto a five-factor model. On the other hand, we should avoid prematureconsensus on a potentially suboptimal model.

Suggestions for Future Studies

In addition to one-, two-, and three-factor structures, we have identifiedtwo other non-Big-Five structures that should be placed in competitionwith the Anglo-Germanic Big Five in future lexical studies. One is theItalianate structure common to results from projects originating in Romeand Trieste, for which De Raad, Di Blas, and Perugini (1998, Table 4)have provided potential marker terms. This structure typifies the Group 2studies, having two Agreeableness-related factors and no Intellect factor.The other structure can be derived from commonalities between theHebrew and Filipino studies and pertains to wider variable selections.This structure also has two Agreeableness-related factors (e.g., Altruismand Irritability), but also two Extraversion-related factors (e.g., Sociabil-ity and Self-Assurance), no single Emotional Stability factor, and bothIntellect and Negative Valence factors. It seems possible that, if appear-ance descriptors are included, an Attractiveness factor could emergeindependent of these seven. We will learn more if future studies test theAnglo-Germanic Big Five in comparison (and competition) with thesealternative candidate structures.

More attention should be given to “middle-level” constructs, such asthose in Figure 1. Such constructs carry most of the load in everydaypersonality description (John, Hampson, & Goldberg, 1991). Two im-portant questions pertain to middle-level constructs. First, which con-


structs are represented by common lexemes in the widest range of humanlanguages? For example, does every language have a word synonymouswith “sociable” or “irritable”? Second, given measures of a consensualset of clusters representing these middle-level constructs, how do thecorrelation matrices of these clusters differ when comparing languages?

Lexical studies have differed not just in the variable selections theyhave employed and in the populations they have sampled, but also withrespect to many potentially important aspects of methodology. Theseaspects include the methods for selecting terms, the size and repre-sentativeness and inclusiveness of the selected terms (e.g., states, evalu-ations, or physical characteristics, in addition to stable traits), theprocedures used to cull and reduce the sets of terms, the type of judgmentsobtained (i.e., internal or external data), the targets of description (e.g.,self or others), the particular rating scales employed, the ways thatmissing data and semantically inconsistent subjects are handled, themethods for addressing individual differences in response scale usage(e.g., by ipsatizing), the type of factor analysis, the number of factorsextracted, and the methods used to compare factors across pairs oflanguages. Discrepancies in findings from one lexical study to anothercould be due to methodological factors alone. Future studies shouldclosely examine the impact of methodological variations on the resultsof lexical studies, both for the broad factors and for the middle-levelclusters.

The Informativeness of Emic-IndigenousStructures

Psychology is the study of mind and behavior of humans in general, notjust of humans in a narrow range of sociocultural settings. Unfortunately,considerations of convenience influence research. Our understandings ofhuman social behavior disproportionately reflect the way in which suchbehavior is manifested in a limited set of populations—those that aremost near at hand for scientists in Western countries. This state of affairscompromises the scientific ideals of generalizability and replicability.

If a factor structure based on indigenous lexical studies of personalityattributes were to prove to be ubiquitous across language communities,it would have a special status. This structure would provide a culturallydecentered model, usable in diverse cultural settings without markedlyimposing the norms or standards of one culture into the context of another

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culture (as in the etic approach of McCrae & Costa, 1997). Representingdimensions shared by many cultures, it would not only enable usefulcross-cultural comparisons but would aid in the identification of cultur-ally specific features of personality structure. For example, it might beuseful to understand why a broad personality factor (e.g., Dynamism) isdifferentiated into a particular set of specific factors in one languagecommunity but into a different set in another language community. Mightthis not reveal something about the differing sociocultural contexts andpsychological preoccupations of these communities?

Many assume that a scientific theory should be replaced once itslimitations and internal contradictions become clear. One might arguethat because the Anglo-Germanic Big Five has a much weaker replicationrecord in emic studies than in etic studies like those of McCrae and Costa(1997), it should be replaced by another model. However, when a theoryhas been shown to have utility as well as limits, it makes more sense tointegrate it into a larger theory, within which it is nested as a special case.For example, Einstein’s physics did not entirely replace Newton’s phys-ics, but rather created a larger framework within which Newton’s theo-retical predictions are seen to be valid under a set of specified conditions.Similarly, the Big Five may not need to be replaced so much as to belocated within a broader, more generalizable framework. We believe thebest framework would be a culturally decentered one that might arisefrom lexical studies in a wide array of languages.

CONCLUSIONS

Lexical studies of personality attributes have been highly generative. Theaddition of another dozen or two lexical studies should vastly increasetheir contributions. However, future lexical studies should be more thanmere imitations of those already conducted. It would be useful if futurestudies placed more emphasis on non-student samples, on targets ofdescription besides only self-report, and on person descriptors that arenot limited strictly to trait terms or to adjectives. Nor should future lexicalstudies primarily be a continued sampling of the national languages ofEurope. More studies are needed in languages used in tropical regions,and in non-European languages that either have a large number ofspeakers (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese) or come from otherimportant language families (e.g., Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Austro-Asiatic, Daic, Dravidian). As lexical studies gain a footing in a progres-


sively wider range of languages, a steadily more useful (and culturallydecentered) personality model might result.

Studying the common words in a language can be a useful avenue tobetter understanding personality. If this is true for one language, it shouldbe all the more true when multiple languages are considered. Patterns ofrepresentation common to multiple languages can be a powerful guideto salient phenomena that are necessary components of an adequatedescriptive model of personality. The combined results of studies inmultiple languages can suggest the optimal organization for such ataxonomy. Such a taxonomy, in turn, will provide a strong base, both forvariable selection and for the construction of maximally efficient person-ality inventories that are useful across a wide variety of cultural contexts.

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