Towards a Taxonomy of Personality Descriptors

Abstract

Personality psychology has not yet established a generally accepted, systematic framework for distinguishing, ordering, and naming individual differences in people's behavior and experience. Such a systematic framework is generally called a taxonomy. In biology, for example, the Linnean taxonomy established an orderly classification of plants and animals and a standard nomenclature. The availability of this initial taxonomy has been a tremendous asset for biologists: it has permitted researchers to study specified classes of instances instead of examining separately every individual instance, and it has served to facilitate the communication and accumulation of empirical findings about these classes and their instances. Personality psychologists face a more difficult task than did the early biologists. Biologists classify individual exemplars according to their attributes; in personality taxonomies, the exemplars are the attributes themselves. Whereas exemplars of animals have a discrete physical existence and can thus be "found" by the researcher in the field, personality attributes can neither be seen nor found nor otherwise directly observed. Personality attributes are abstract concepts that have to be inferred, and the mere existence of personality attributes in people has been a matter of debate. There is another important difference between personality attributes and natural objects. Although the number of animals, for example, is exceedingly large, it is, in principle, finite at any given time. In contrast, the number of ways in which people differ from each other is seemingly infinite, for one can always think of new attributes (e.g., computer literate, "nerdy") or subdivide previously known attributes into more specific ones. Given these difficulties, it should come as no surprise that personality psychologists have struggled for the past fifty years with the task of specifying, cataloguing, and ordering the domain of individual differences. Some psychologists have turned to natural language as an initial source of personality attributes. Natural language provides a finite yet extensive D. M. Buss et al. (eds.), Personality Psychology