This proposal is concerned with the personality categories that people use to encode those individual differences which they encounter in everyday life. We develop a semantic model of personality traits as hierarchically organized categories whose instances are behavioral acts of varying degrees of prototypicality. First, we establish a pool of traits varying in category breadth; employing a new measure of category breadth, we will show that broad traits refer to more diverse acts and are more meaningful than narrow ones, and we will demonstrate asymetrical implications for trait pairs varying in category breadth. Second, in studies of the prototypicality of behavioral acts, we extended our model by specifying situational settings, analyzing trait confirmatory and disconfirmatory acts, and accounting for multiple categorizations of behaviors. Third, various experiments are proposed in order to determine whether there is a level of categorization that is particularly informative or helpful, and how it changes as a function of the target information available to the perceiver, the purpose of the task, the current state of the perceiver, and stable perceiver characteristics. A final set of studies tests some implications of our hierarchical model of trait categories for issues in personality assessment.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH039077-02
Application #
3377020
Study Section
Cognition, Emotion, and Personality Research Review Committee (CEP)
Project Start
1984-04-01
Project End
1987-03-31
Budget Start
1985-04-01
Budget End
1986-03-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
1985
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Oregon Research Institute
Department
Type
DUNS #
053615423
City
Eugene
State
OR
Country
United States
Zip Code
97403
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Peabody, D; Goldberg, L R (1989) Some determinants of factor structures from personality-trait descriptors. J Pers Soc Psychol 57:552-67

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