Personality Structure in the Trait Lexicon of Hindi, a Major Language Spoken in India

Abstract

The psycho‐lexical approach is extended to Hindi, a major language spoken in India. From both the dictionary and from Hindi novels, a huge set of personality descriptors was put together, ultimately reduced to a manageable set of 295 trait terms. Both self and peer ratings were collected on those terms from a sample of 511 participants. Factor analyses (principal components analysis), performed separately on self and on peer ratings, suggested three up to six factors. From a comparison with an ancient but still popular system of personality description, called the triguna, and from a comparison with a recently developed comprehensive trait taxonomy in Dutch, it was concluded that only three factors, not to be confused with the Big Three, firmly stood out, all three belonging to the three‐dimensional triguna. Congruence coefficients between factors based on self and on peer ratings confirmed the stability of these three factors. The three factors are called rajasic, representing ambition, friendliness, humility versus hypocrisy, deception and violence, tamasic, representing egoism, mean mindedness and concealment, and finally sattvic, representing competence, impartiality, being organized, sober and harmonious. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology

Psychometric Evaluation of the BFI-10 and the NEO-FFI-3 in Indian Adolescents

“…Other Asian studies have provided evidence for additional domains like “interpersonal relatedness” which are not adequately captured in the FFM (Cheung, 2004; Ashton and Lee, 2007; Cheung et al, 2008). In India, Singh et al (2013) gave evidence for a three-factor personality structure linked to the ancient upanishadic “trigunas” and suggested that the FFM did not adequately describe the Hindi speaking participants’ personality (see also Singh, 2016; Singh and De Raad, 2017). Hence, there are reasons for not expecting that a particular number of trait dimensions would emerge in a non-Western culture when personality factors of an inventory are developed based on lexical usages of the native language, i.e., in an “emic” measure (Gurven et al, 2013).…”

Towards A Pan–Cultural Personality Structure: Input from 11 Psycholexical Studies

“…Boies, Lee, Ashton, Pascal, and Nicol (2001) Indo-European Latin German Angleitner, Ostendorf, and John (1990) Indo-European Germanic Greek Saucier, Georgiades, Tsaousis, and Goldberg (2005) Indo-European Hellenic Hebrew Almagor, Tellegen, and Waller (1995) Afro-Asiatic Semitic Hungarian Szirmák and De Raad (1994), De Raad and Uralic Ugric Indian Singh et al (2013) Indo-European Indic Italian Caprara and Perugini (1994), Di Blas and Forzi (1998) Indo-European Latin Japanese Aoki (1971), Isaka (1990) Italian: Di Blas & Forzi, 1999;Korean: Hahn et al, 1999), put forward as a recurrent six-factor model (Ashton, Lee, & Son, 2000), and thereupon identified in some other languages (Ashton et al, 2004), again mainly on the basis of factor interpretations.…”

Taxonomy and structure of Persian personality‐descriptive trait terms

“…Nel et al, ), and still others have used novels to complete the personality lexicon extracted from the dictionary (e.g. Singh et al, ). The problem with contemporary Persian dictionaries is that they form less a sediment of the communications on social realities than dictionaries in many other languages appear to do.…”

“…Yet, that area captures about one third of the languages in the world and almost two third of the world population. Trait taxonomies in Turkish and Korean, for example, appear to be similar to the Big Five configuration, but Chinese (Zhou, Saucier, Gao, & Liu, ), Tagalog (Church, Katigbak, & Reyes, ) and Hindi (Singh, Misra, & De Raad, ) diverge. Recently, De Raad et al () concluded on the basis of comparisons of 14 available taxonomies that replicability of factors across the pertaining languages may be possible for three factors, not for five or six (cf.…”