ABSTRACT
WE have seen in the preceding section that impulsiveness and sociability are correlated, and that the notion of a second-order factor of extraversion is in fact built upon correlations of first-order factors of this kind. However, it is often suggested that higher-order factors are little better than statistical artefacts, and that more ‘reality’ (whatever that may mean) adheres to first-order factors. We shall take up this argument again later on; here we shall merely report an experiment to illustrate our view that such an opinion is exactly the opposite of the truth.
