ABSTRACT
The personality theorist regards personality as being a characteristic residing within the individual which is a major determinant of the individual’s behaviour. Personality theories arising from the personality theorist’s perspective are of two kinds: single-trait theories, which concentrate on one aspect of personality, and multi-trait theories, which are concerned with describing the entire personality structure. The over-reliance on personality researchers’ own intuitions has been responsible for at least some of the failure to find satisfactory levels of behavioural consistency. The actor component refers to the characteristics the person brings to the social situation in which personality is constructed. Behavioural confirmation or disconfirmation can be predicted from the nature of the theory with which the person is operating. A. H. Buss and K. H. Craik’s approach combines the lay perspective and the personality theorist’s perspective by using the systematic analysis of lay beliefs about trait-behaviour relations as the foundation of a personality assessment procedure.
