On the curious history of the big six: Variable selection and “moral exclusion” in the formation of fundamental personality models.

The Big Five became the foremost model of personality-trait structure in the last three decades, but was formed out of item/variable selections that partially or totally omitted dispositional content related to morality, ethics, integrity, and honesty. Such morality-relevant content has, for several reasons reviewed, extreme importance within the dimension of dispositional tendencies. Previous histories of the Big Five ignore details that account for this pattern of moral-content exclusion, exclusion that tended to impede identification of a key factor in a Big Six or HEXACO model. Here, a set of frequently referenced and highly morality-relevant adjective concepts are identified, based on ratings by 10 judges. The treatment of these concepts enables a tracing of the specific routes and rationales by which exclusion (and partial inclusion) operated in key lexical studies of the archaic period of lexical studies (up through 1993; in English and German), that reveals how variable-selection decisions by early investigators tended to impede identification of an important dimension of personality. Recommendations are offered for future personality-structure research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Zeitschrift fur Psychologie - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research