The General Factor of Personality and Evaluation

Abstract

According to the proposal of the general factor of personality (GFP), socially desirable personality traits have been selected for throughout evolution because they increase fitness. However, it remains unknown whether people high on this factor actually behave in socially desirable ways or whether they simply endorse traits of positive valence. We separated these two sources of variance by having 619 participants respond to 120 personality adjectives organised into 30 quadruples balanced for content and valence (e.g. unambitious, easy-going, driven and workaholic tapped the trait achievement-striving). An exploratory six-factor solution fit well, and the factors resembled the Big Five. We subsequently extracted a higher-order factor from this solution, which appeared similar to the GFP. A Schmid-Leiman transformation of the higher-order factor, however, revealed that it clustered items of similar valence but opposite content (e.g. at the negative pole, unambitious and workaholic), rendering it an implausible description of evolved adaptive behaviour. Isolating this evaluative factor using exploratory structural equation modelling generated factors consisting of items of similar descriptive content but different valence (e.g. driven and workaholic), and the correlations among these factors were of small magnitude, indicating that the putative GFP capitalises primarily on evaluative rather than descriptive variance. Implications are discussed.

Do maladaptive behaviors exist at one or both ends of personality traits?

“…Furthermore, even though the SNAP was not designed to include matched pairs of opposite items, this dimension contained a few sets of items that were opposite in descriptive content but alike in valence (cf. Edwards, 1969;Pettersson et al Note. To conserve space, only the top 20 loading items for each factor are displayed.…”

The Structure and Correlates of Self-ReportedDSM-5Maladaptive Personality Traits: Findings From Two German-Speaking Samples

“…Additional important questions pertain to the temporal stability of DSM-5 traits and to their relation to the general factor of personality evaluation (cf. Leising & Zimmermann, 2011;Pettersson, Turkheimer, Horn, & Menatti, 2012). We hope that making the PID-5 available to the German-speaking scientific community will stimulate research on these and related questions and will also help improve the evidence base for a continued development of the official PD classification systems.…”

Testing a bi-factor model to disentangle general and specific factors of motivation in self-determination theory

“…However, a general factor of personality contained negatively and positively worded items suggesting that a general factor may represent more than method effects (Pettersson, Turkheimer, Horn, & Menatti, 2012). Based on contentions by Ryan (1995) who stated that regulations ''.…”