16 Personality Factors

16 Personality Factors

Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors (16 PF)

Origins

In 1936 Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert hypothesized that:

Those individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people’s lives will eventually become encoded into their language; the more important such a difference, the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word.

This statement has become known as the Lexical Hypothesis.

Allport and Odbert extracted 18,000 personality-describing words from the two most comprehensive dictionaries of the English language available to them at the time. From this list they extracted 4500 personality-describing adjectives which they considered to describe observable and relatively permanent traits.

In 1946 Raymond Cattell analysed the Allport-Odbert list. He organized it into 181 clusters and asked subjects to rate people they knew by the adjectives on the list. From this he generated twelve factors, and then included four factors which he thought ought to appear. The result was the hypothesis that individuals describe themselves and each other according to sixteen different, independent factors.

Cattell referred to these 16 factors as primary factors, as opposed to the so-called “Big Five” factors which he considered global factors. All of the primary factors correlate with global factors and could therefore be considered subfactors within them.

Warmth

Reasoning

Emotional Stability

Dominance

Liveliness

Rules

Boldness

Sensitivity

Vigilence

Abstract

Private

Apprehension

Openess

Reliance

Perfectionism

Tension

Global Factors