The Sparkling 12!
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Everyone knows we have different personalities, but what exactly are they?

What Precisely Are Personality Traits?

People have always known and spoken about the many personality traits that we exhibit on a daily basis. We have words like: nasty, intelligent, happy-go-luck, pessimistic, funny, resilient, brave, resourceful, superficial, lazy, submissive etc. There are hundreds of words that describe people's attitudes and behaviours but many of them are describing the same thing and some are not personality traits at all. So exactly what are personality traits and how many are there?

Wikipedia defines "personality" as: "characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns". We must be careful however not to confuse personality, which is permanent, with emotions, which are transient. For example one might describe someone as "angry" but no one is angry all the time so it is not properly a personality trait. That person might have a propensity for anger but that probably indicates a distrustful, aggressive and intolerant mindset. Those are permanent aspects so it is they that are the personality traits, not anger which is only a symptom. Likewise numerous other emotions such as: happiness, contempt, disappointment, envy, lust etc are also not personality traits.

If we are going to enumerate all the personality traits there are we need to be able to define them objectively. If we are going to use them in science we need to be able to define them scientifically, mathematically even. Indeed we need to be able to treat them as separate axes in a personality space of n dimensions. To do this we need to know for each trait whether it is a dipole and whether it is orthogonal to the others. For the purposes of this article I shall define orthogonal to mean that a trait does not overlap with any other, neither in meaning nor in experimental effect.

To date the biggest stumbling block has been establishing such things objectively. Psychologists attempt to do this mainly through set written tests which may then be analysed mathematically. Various theories and trait lists have been invented over time including: Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, Murray's System of Needs and Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire. The most popular at the time of writing however are "The Big Five" and "Cattell's 16PF".

These two are strikingly different from each other which begs the question: Is there a right answer to the question and if so which one is right? Well, as I will demonstrate, there are problems with both of these and there are also good things about both of them, so in my opinion, the answer lies somewhere between the two. In short 5 is not enough and 16 is too many, so I have seen fit to take the best of both models and produce a happy medium. Taking a leaf out of the charismatic title of The Big 5 I call my collection "The Sparkling 12"!

Excelsior!

The Big Five

"The Big Five", aka the "OCEAN" model, was developed by at least four independent sets of researchers from 1961 onwards: Tupes and Christal, Goldberg, Cattell and Costa and McCrae. The fact that so many independent people achieved substantial agreement in such an apparently subjective matter is a strong argument in favour of its validity. All are dipoles and presumably reasonably orthogonal and they are:

I detect a systemic problem here with this set, in that a psychiatrist's bias has clearly crept into the system. "Neuroticism" taints its category with the reek of the mentally ill, rather than looking at what personality traits are exhibited by the mentally healthy. Otherwise unrelated traits are grouped together simply because that is how they manifest in the behavior of test subjects which is not necessarily an accurate picture of the real world. This one is the most obvious example but the others are tainted as well, albeit more subtly.

It is also clear that there are too few traits here. One reason is that separate traits have been grouped together, eg timid and practical are clearly not the same trait. Likewise chaotic and flexible, social and energetic, inconsiderate and suspicious, optimistic & tough etc. What is needed for the purposes of the real world is a set of traits that are semantically orthogonal rather than experimentally orthogonal.

Another cause is that well known traits are simply missing, eg ambitious, self-reliant, abstract thinking etc.

The Big 5 may be well supported by clinical trials but for the purposes of general use by people other than research psychologists it is too clumsy to be of much use. It may be that certain traits that are clearly semantically different are not experimentally orthogonal but to me that doesn't justify lumping them together. There's no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We all know that chaotic and flexible are two separate things. We need to split apart the awkward bedfellows and damn the non-orthogonality!

The 16PF

The "Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire", (16PF), is a self-report personality test developed over several decades by Raymond B. Cattell, Maurice Tatsuoka and Herbert Eber. The traits revealed are all dipoles, though not all orthogonal, and they are:

After looking at these we can see that where the Big 5 had too few dipoles the 16PF has too many. There are 4 factors here that equate to extraversion and 3 to toughness for example. There is a lot of overlap between categories here and poor orthogonality. I don't think that Cattell had a solid grasp of the factors he was dealing with and it is no wonder that the Big 5 is overtaking him in the world of psychology.

Finally, just because Raymond Cattell had a number of duplicate factors doesn't mean that he got all the factors available. One important dipole that he missed is: selfish-selfless. I guess this can fit in with the Big 5's "agreeableness" although it shows once again that some of the Big 5 categories need to be split.

Finding The Happy Medium

As I have demonstrated, the existing lists of personality traits are unsatisfactory for describing healthy people. Those lists are tainted by the focus of their creators and users on the disorders of the mentally unhealthy. They also exhibit either poor differentiation or orthogonality.

In order to fix these problems it is necessary to split certain categories and to combine others. It is also necessary to reframe the negative words into something positive. After all, each side of each dipole must have its own positive and negative aspect. I shall add the negative aspects to each pole later.

Remaining from the Big 5

Split from the Big 5

From the 16PF that are not subsumed into the above

Discarded

intelligent - stupid, energetic - low-key: these are not traits of personality.
careless, timid, easily-led etc are negative views of traits and will be included later.

So here we have our list of 12 personality traits, largely derived from existing popular lists used by research psychologists. All that remain now is to group them by function and add the negative aspects. Behold: The Sparkling 12!

The "Sparkling 12"

I was also able to split these 12 into the following subdomains:

Trait Name Subdomain High Pole Positive Aspect Low Pole Positive Aspect High Pole Negative Aspect Low Pole Negative Aspect
Expectation How we see things optimistic, hopeful, trusting pessimistic, resigned, wary gullible, naive, dreaming depressed, hopeless, cynical, kill-joy
Abstraction How we think abstract, inventive, idealistic, playful conventional, grounded, realistic, practical unreal, fanciful, impractical, childish basic, unimaginative, boring, humourless
Organisation How we think ordered, efficient, reliable, disciplined chaotic, extravagant, unpredictable, impulsive anal, mean, boring, robotic confused, wasteful, dishonest, unstable
Rationality How we think dispassionate, guided by the head, cool, objective emotional, guided by the heart, warm, subjective indifferent, boring, cold irrational, temperamental, sentimental
Daring How we tackle problems bold, curious, rebellious cautious, fixed-minded, obedient reckless, obsessed, trouble making timid, dull, slavish
Motivation How we tackle problems driven, tense, ambitious, impatient relaxed, loose, content, patient obsessed, strained, over-zealous, discontented, frustrated lazy, complaisant, limp, facile, meek
Tenacity How we tackle problems persistent, loyal, firm disenthralled, changeable, flexible stubborn, irritating, incessant, staid infirm of purpose, disloyal, unstable, yielding
Toughness How we tackle problems resilient, tough, confident, stress tolerant delicate, sensitive, nervous, stress intolerant thick, insensitive, callous, presuming, heedless feeble, touchy, shaky, overwrought
Abnegation How we act socially group focused, looking after others, compromising, humble self focused, looking after #1, uncompromising, proud slavish, poor, weak, undignified selfish, greedy, quarrelsome, egotistical
Dominance How we act socially dominant, forceful, assertive, aggressive, competitive submissive, docile, deferential, cooperative bossy, demanding, violent, antagonistic, restless cowering, tame, boot-licking, servile, lifeless
Extroversion How we act socially extrovert, outgoing, social introvert, inward-looking, solitary show-off, forward, incomplete narcissist, shy, sheepish, aloof
Self-reliance How we act socially self-reliant, autonomous, resourceful dependent, subordinate, susceptible insular, arrogant, disobedient defenceless, slavish, incompetent


It should be noted that people do not tend to fit neatly into one of the extremes in each of these dipoles. Rather, most people are clustered around the centre in a roughly normal distribution. In view of this fact, personality models would be more accurate and useful if they had a neutral position for each trait. Of course the neutral position provides no data and no colour but that is the reality of most personality traits for most people. "Average" may be colourless but it is very popular!

Conclusion

Now we have 12 personality traits drawn from the 2 most popular lists of traits in modern psychology. These are no longer focused on the behaviour of the mentally ill but on the normal behaviour of healthy human beings. This list seems to me to be pretty comprehensive and the dipoles seem reasonably semantically orthogonal. There are some overlaps, notably between dominance, self-reliance and abnegation and also between organisation and abstraction. One could recombine these but then the category would seem too diverse so we must tolerate some non-orthogonality to achieve "The Sparkling 12"!

I commend it to you all!


Warren Mars 6/4/2021