From Big Five to Big One: Higher-order structural hierarchy of personality

1. From Big Five to Big One: Higher-order structural hierarchy of personality Janek Musek University of Ljubljana SLOVENIA ALPS ADRIA PSYCHOLOGY CONFERENCE LJUBLJANA 2008

2. Outline of presentation • Introduction: New proposal of personality structure • Two studies • Methods • Results • General factor of personality (GFP) • Cross-cultural stability of GFP • Psychological meaning of GFP • Conclusions

3. Models of personality structure • A great variety of structural models in psychology • Intelligence • Personality (outside cognitive abilities domain) • Other domains (e.g. well-being, values…) • Debate in personality structure domain • 16 (Cattell), 5 (Big Five), 3 (Eysenck) or 2 (Digman)? • Question of possible general factor of personality largely ignored • Notable exceptions (Saucier & Goldberg, 2003; Stankov, 2005) • Yet… • The evidence for GFP in Five Factor Model

4. GFP considered seriously • Strategic correlations among B5 • Typical example below (-N, A, C, E; O, E) • These correlations cannot be reduced to the evaluation, social desirability or methodological artifacts • On the other hand, GFP correlates very substantially with psychologically meaningful variables like self-esteem, self-concept, well-being, emotionality (positive, negative affect), motivation (approach-avoidance) and others even if partialized for social desirability • Support from evolutionary oriented research (Rushton, Figuereido)

5. Method: Study I • Research design: multivariate (exploratory and confirmatory FA in first line; other multivariate analyses as well) • Three samples in first research: • Sample 1: N=301 (120 F, 181 M; mean age=36.95; SD=10.37) • Sample 2: N=185 (100 F, 85 M; mean age=39.11; SD=13.26) • Sample 3: N=285 (165 F, 120 M; mean age=16.37; SD=1.24) • More samples and subsamples (Slovenian and other) in further investigations (not published yet) • Measures (all Slovenian translated versions): • BFI (John, 1990; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991; John & Srivastava, 1999) • IPIP-300 (Goldberg, 1999) • BFO (Caprara, G. V., Barbaranelli, C., Borgogni, L. & Perugini, M., 1993; Caprara, Barbaranelli & Borgogni, 1994) • Data from other studies supported the strength of first factor and consequently yielded GFP (practically all available results including cross-cultural studies with nationally aggregated data /Musek, 2008/; also data collected by Rushton and colleagues, 2008)

6. Exploratory results • Results for scales BFI, IPIP, BFO), facets (IPIP) and items (BFI, BFO) • Factorizability of BF scales and items • Direct extraction of one single factor • GFP explained • 50,20% of variance in 5 BFI scales • 23,58% of variance in 44 BFI items • 40,18% of variance in 5 IPIP scales • 25,13% of variance in 30 IPIP facets • 44,84% of variance in BFO SCALES • Practically identical factors in scale and non-scale solutions

7. Confirmatory results • All selected indices confirmed the underlying models

8. Proposed final model of personality structure

9. Method: Study II • How stable or universal is GFP? • 5 different studies on culturally different samples (omitted for the sake of space, yet focused on the following) • Aggregated data • On 56 national samples from the study of Schmitt et al. (2006) • Instruments: • BFI, NEO-FFI, NEO-PI

10. 56 nations data (Schmitt et al., 2006) • Correlations • Factorizability (acceptable; KMO=0,655) • Suggested 1 factor extraction (all indices including Kaiser criterion, scree test and parallel test)

11. 56 nations data (Schmitt et al., 2006), cont. • Scree plot • Factor loadings • Confirmed meaning of GFP in B5 terms: high versus low conscientiousness (C), agreeableness (A), stability (-N), extraversion (E) and openness (O)

12. Main issues for discussion • Psychological nature of GFP • Connections with other major psychological variables • Possible biological bases of GFP • Evolutionary • Genetic • Neurophysiological

13. The meaning of GFP in terms of the Big Five • Irrespective of the perspective of data (within or across cultural milieus) • High versus low emotional stability (-N), conscientiousness (C), agreeableness (A), extraversion (E) and openness (O) • GFP formula: • -N,+C,+A,+E,+O

14. GFP, emotionality, well-being and self-esteem • Substantial and relatively high association • About 60% common variance between GFP and these measures Table 7. Correlations and squared multiple correlation between GFPs and the measures of emotionality, well-being, and self-esteem *P<0.05, **P<0.01 (two-tailed) a GFP obtained by direct extraction of single factor. b GFP obtained by stepwise hierarchical higher-order factoring.

15. Correlations (N=301) • All correlations are significant • The highest correlations between general factors of personality and well-being domain (including self-esteem)

16. Psychological meaning of GFP • Evaluation and social desirability certainly contribute to the correlations among items and scales of B5 measures • Some other factors can also affect the correlations between items • Correlations between lexically short expressions (e.g. adjectives) are bigger than correlations between lalrger contextual questions or statements • Faking tendency increases the correlations (Ziegler, 2006) • Yet all these factors do not reduce the correlations essentially • For instance in our investigations (N=108) the social desirability (SDS) explained about 18 percent of GFP, and that is much less than general well-being (gFB; see the regression model below) • It seems that GFP has a definite psychological content, which is strongly associated with well-being and is also remarkably heritable (Musek, 2007; Rushton, 2008)

17. More speculations about the nature of GFP • Probable existence of a common dimensions unifying basic dimensions of personality, emotionality, motivation, psychological or subjective well-being and self-esteem • Evolutionary, genetic and neurophysiological basis of that dimension • GFP is a personality representative of it

18. Evolutionary and genetic aspects of GFP • Evolutionary advantages of those personal, emotional and motivational characteristics that are more prone to the social approval and more promoting better well-being • Moving toward the big equation in psychology, at least in personality domain?

19. GFP correlates in personality, emotionality, motivation, self, well-being, culture, and biology (Musek, 2007)

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21. GFP related BFI items