ArticleIntegrative psychological & behavioral science2013
Personality psychology: lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story--why it is time for a paradigm shift.
Article in Integrative psychological & behavioral science, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- An interdisciplinary linked-lives approach to individual differences in social behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Psychology's Questionable Research Fundamentals (QRFs): Key problems in quantitative psychology and psychological measurement beyond Questionable Research Practices (QRPs).Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
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- Statistics is not measurement: The inbuilt semantics of psychometric scales and language-based models obscures crucial epistemic differences.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Towards an Integrated Concept of Personality in Human and Nonhuman Animals.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- A social science trust taxonomy with emergent vectors and symmetry.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Psychology of Changeability: Basic Principles of Description of Processual Nature of Personality.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2023Article
- Stress Experience, Depression and Neck Disability in Patients with Temporomandibular Disorder-Myofascial Pain with Referral.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Article
- Understanding underlying moral values and language use of COVID-19 vaccine attitudes on twitter.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Fish personality: meta-theoretical issues, personality dimensions, and applications to neuroscience and psychopathology.Personality neuroscience · 2023Review
- Status-impact assessment: is accuracy linked with status motivations?Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Rating scales institutionalise a network of logical errors and conceptual problems in research practices: A rigorous analysis showing ways to tackle psychology's crises.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The Importance of Type D Personality in the Development of Temporomandibular Disorders (TMDs) and Depression in Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Psychology's Status as a Science: Peculiarities and Intrinsic Challenges. Moving Beyond its Current Deadlock Towards Conceptual Integration.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2021Article
- Defining Behavior and its Relationship to the Science of Psychology.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2020Article
- Validation of Two Short Personality Inventories Using Self-Descriptions in Natural Language and Quantitative Semantics Test Theory.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Sex differences in longitudinal personality stability in chimpanzees.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Niche diversity can explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure.Nature human behaviour · 2019Article
- Personality links with lifespan in chimpanzees.eLife · 2018Article
- Taxonomic models of individual differences: a guide to transdisciplinary approaches.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
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Abstract
This article develops a comprehensive philosophy-of-science for personality psychology that goes far beyond the scope of the lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts that currently prevail. One of the field's most important guiding scientific assumptions, the lexical hypothesis, is analysed from meta-theoretical viewpoints to reveal that it explicitly describes two sets of phenomena that must be clearly differentiated: 1) lexical repertoires and the representations that they encode and 2) the kinds of phenomena that are represented. Thus far, personality psychologists largely explored only the former, but have seriously neglected studying the latter. Meta-theoretical analyses of these different kinds of phenomena and their distinct natures, commonalities, differences, and interrelations reveal that personality psychology's focus on lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts entails a) erroneous meta-theoretical assumptions about what the phenomena being studied actually are, and thus how they can be analysed and interpreted, b) that contemporary personality psychology is largely based on everyday psychological knowledge, and c) a fundamental circularity in the scientific explanations used in trait psychology. These findings seriously challenge the widespread assumptions about the causal and universal status of the phenomena described by prominent personality models. The current state of knowledge about the lexical hypothesis is reviewed, and implications for personality psychology are discussed. Ten desiderata for future research are outlined to overcome the current paradigmatic fixations that are substantially hampering intellectual innovation and progress in the field.
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