Raymond Bernard Cattell — 16 Personality Factors

9. Raymond Bernard Cattell — 16 Personality Factors.

During the development of the Mandala of Characters, I paid a lot of attention to finding relevant terms and phrases that describe the particular places on the Mandala. In these searches, among other things, I was repeatedly amazed at how great psychological knowledge is in language. This knowledge is contained in various concepts, terms, phrases, sayings, proverbs, etc.

Of course, I am not the first who noticed this treasure hidden in the language.

The fascination with what the language hides and discovering the rich knowledge hidden in it is very old. Linguistic considerations were already carried out by the ancients. For example, on this Wikipedia webpage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics
we can learn that linguistic texts were written already in ancient Babylonia and India.

Besides, nowadays, many documentaries show archaeologists' work and their discoveries, for example, about the findings in ancient India, China, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Maya, Inca, and many, many other ancient civilizations. In these documentaries, we can see archaeologists’ fascination with ancient languages, symbolism, and ancient cultures and traditions in general.

If we turn to psychology, psychology has been functioning as a separate science branch since the 19th century. And in psychology, a fascination with language also appeared. And what interests us here is that this psychological fascination with language connects with the study of personality to a large extent. Thus, in psychology, it was quickly noticed that our characters' traits are reflected in some words or phrases used in the language.

Probably the first researcher who analysed the dictionary and searched in it for personality terms was Francis Galton—English Victoria era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. Galton in 1884 presented about a thousand words describing personalities. It is a quote what he wrote about this.

However, Galton’s work was not systematic and insightful enough. And probably for this reason for the next two decades, it did not gain much attention.

In 1910, the American psychologist George E. Partridge distinguished about 750 English words describing mental states.

I like the phrase "mental states" here because I use in the Mandala of Characters phrase "psychological state" which is very close to "mental states".

Then, in 1926 L. Perkins, using Webster's New International Dictionary, distinguished 3,000 words related to personality.

Also, in 1926, Ludwig Klages, a German philosopher, psychologist, graphologist, poet, writer and lecturer, gave a great impulse to continue studying personality based on language. One of the Klages’ areas of interest was the philosophy of language.

By combining reflections on linguistics and psychology, he emphasized that linguistic considerations can be the basis for understanding personality. According to Klages’ estimates, there are about four thousand words in his native German language that describe inner states.

I like Klages’s term “inner states” because in Mandala of Characters I use term “psychological state” which could actually be described as well—inner state.

Next, the linguistic considerations and analyses undertook the Swiss psychologist of Polish origin—Franciszka Baumgarten (or Franziska Baumgarten-Tramer). She was the author of many works in German, French and Polish. Among other things, she was very interested in the characters about which she wrote six works in the period 1993 … 1952.

Baumgarten collected from various dictionaries, and from the publications of German-speaking researches terms describing personalities. She focused on the terms which, in her opinion, occurred the most often. In total, she distinguished 941 adjectives and 688 nouns describing characters. The number of terms was thus less than the four thousand assumed by Klages, mentioned above.

Unfortunately, Klages proved to be a supporter of National Socialism, that is, Nazi Germany ideology. This fact greatly influenced the negative attitude of the psychological community in Germany towards lexical personality research. This topic was not taken up in Germany until the 1980s, by the following researches: Oliver P. John, Alois Angleitner, Fritz Ostendorf and others.

Fortunately, Franziska Baumgarten’s lexical personality studies, published in 1933, inspired two American researchers: Gordon Allport and Henry S. Odbert.

Allport and Odbert, like the aforementioned—M. L. Perkins, used for their studies Webster's New International Dictionary containing 550,000 terms. From among these terms, they choose those that defined human behavior. Allport and Odbert preferred adjectives rather than nouns. They choose nouns only when there were no equivalents among adjectives and participles. They also added to their list terms used colloquially and used in a dialect that was not included in the dictionary. In the end, Allport and Odbert distinguished 17 953 terms to describe human behavior and characters.

These terms are divided into four categories or columns. On the Wikipedia page,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis
we can find out that these columns were as follows:

• The first column contains 4,504 terms related to personality traits (for example, aggressive, introverted, sociable).
• The second column —4542 terms—concerns present states, attitudes, emotions, and moods (for example, rejoicing, frantic).
• The third column—5226 words—relates to the social evaluation of an individual’s character (for example, worthy, insignificant).
• The fourth column— 3682 words—by the authors called the “miscellaneous column”, contains important personality-descriptive terms that did not fit into the other three columns.

The Allport and Odbert’s list was the starting point for Raymond Bernard Cattell's research. Cattell was an American-British psychologist. Interestingly, psychology was not his main fascination at first. Cattell was fascinated by science in his youth. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of great discoveries. Cattell also admired the accomplishments of the great discoverers of that time. He wrote:

Cattell's scientific fascination led him to King's College in London, where he studied chemistry and physics.

After the First World War, Cattell was deeply moved by the enormous destruction and human suffering the war had caused. Then he was more and more attracted to the idea behind the question—Could serious human problems be solved with scientific tools? So, Cattell added a fascination with psychology to his scientific passion. In this situation, he decided to graduate from King's College in London.

As I mentioned above, the Allport and Odbert’s list was the starting point for Cattell’s work. Based on this list, Cattell decided to create an advanced personality model. To achieve this, Cattell sought to discover the main dimensions of personality, which can be distinguished in the English language. The first step to achieving this was to reduce the number of terms which Allport and Odbert distinguished on their list to a manageable number. To reduce the number of terms, Cattell grouped similar terms. That is, he was looking for the words that are synonyms. In sorting, Cattell used literature student’s help and the so-called judges. Judges who agreed on where to allocate words that might be disputed in interpretation. However, it is not known how Cattell defined the concept of a synonym. It is also unknown what the arrangements between the judges were? We can guess that the concept of a synonym was quite broadly understood to facilitate the selection of individual terms.

Next, Cattell associated oppositional terms, that is, terms that are antonyms. Cattell’s process of selecting words for antonyms is also difficult to verify. In this way, Cattell obtained 160 groups (so-called clusters). Most of them were antonyms. Cattell then selected 13 terms from each cluster and summarized them with one key term. As a result, Cattell eliminated more than half of the terms from Allport and Odbert’s list. Cattell then eliminated prefixed words, obsolete, and foreign terms that were represented by other terms.

To examine the depth of his list of terms, Cattell reviewed the psychological literature he had access to at that time. After this reading, Cattell added terms from the psychological literature to each cluster. As a result of analyzing individual clusters, Cattell removed some of them and added new ones. Finally, the number of clusters was 171.

Then Cattell went to a very tedious analytical process using the statistical method—factor analysis. The precursor of this method was the English psychologist and statistician—Charles Spearman. Cattell, at the beginning of the scientific career, had the opportunity to work with Spearman. It means Cattell did his graduate work with Spearman while he was working on his PhD.

In total, Cattell distinguished 35 clusters using the word selection methods above-mentioned. Personally, I was curious about what these clusters looked like, and I found them in Cattell’s paper from 1945. Below I recall these clusters.

Later, above 35 clusters, Cattell reduced further. And in total, Cattell, initiated in 1940 process of reducing Allport and Odbert’s list, ended in 1947. This year he acknowledged that he distinguished and confirmed 12 primary personality factors. To those twelve factors, he added four factors for the personality questionnaire. So, finally, Cattell distinguished and used sixteen primary personality factors.

The Cattell’s personality questionnaire was published in 1949 and is called—16 Personality Factors Questionnaire.

Since 1949, this questionnaire has been developed, and four subsequent versions were published. It means, in 1956, 1962, 1968, and the latest version in 1992). Besides, the questionnaire has so far been adapted to over 35 languages.

Then, it is time to introduce Raymond Cattell’s 16 Primary Personality Factors. These factors are presented in a table that we can find, among others, on Wikipedia pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16PF_Questionnaire

It is this table.

Now, when we have the table above, I will show where the 16 Personality Factors can be located in the Mandala of Characters.

As we can see in the diagram above, Cattell’s Personality Factors are not arranged in the same order shown in the table above. This is because I put the individual factors in those places on the Mandala to which they fit most.

Cattell’s Personality Factors are fascinating for me because they show a range of personality traits of a given type. In other words, these traits show the extremes between which each type is located.

For example, Factor A that we can find near the type Hot Air looks like this.

A.Warmth
warm ←-→ reserve

Here we see Personality Factor, referred to as “Warmth” includes character traits that are located between:
— traits such as “warm”,
— and traits such as “reserve”.

Showing such extremes or ranges of personality traits for individual types of characters is a fascinating approach that says a lot about the particular types. And interestingly, as I wrote above, Cattell came to this by analyzing, reducing, and arranging in various ways:
— words about characters from the Allport and Odbert’s list (based on the English dictionary),
— and terms related to personalities from the psychological literature.

Although Cattell was criticized a lot that his reduction process and statistical calculations are difficult to replicate, in my opinion, the effect of his work is astonishingly accurate. For sure, it is really worth our attention. Personally, I came across Cattell’s typology recently; however, I am pleased that I started to get acquainted with this typology.

Bibliografia: