| Abstract: | Personality traits have been challenged as unimportant determinants of behavior, but evidence suggests that traits may carry as much variance as experimental manipulations. Asking whether traits or manipulations control more variance is useless because researchers can plan paradigms that favor one or the other. When traits and manipulations complement each other there are several major kinds of interaction. The trait–manipulation dichotomy is analogous to the person–environment dichotomy, and both are related to active versus passive models of behavior. Trait variance is increased by aggregating across responses, situations, and time. Underlying aggregation are the issues of units and classes of behavior. Individual responses are on a continuum of breadth that extends successively upward to response classes, personality traits, and higher order traits. Broad and narrow traits each have advantages and disadvantages. Recent research has led to novel personality traits and to knowledge about the origin and maintenance of traits. If there is to be a specialty called personality, its unique and therefore defining characteristic is traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
