ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst of interest in one of the most fundamental problems in the scientific study of human personality, namely, the development of a taxonomy of personality traits. Of more importance, the beginning of a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic structure. As a consequence, the scientific study of personality dispositions, which had been cast into the doldrums in the 1970s (Goldberg, in press), is again an intellectually vigorous enterprise poised on the brink of a solution to a scientific problem whose roots extend back at least to Aristotle. In the words of Moses, “More than two decades after personality assessment fell out of the mainstream of industrial-organizational psychology and nearly disappeared, it is back” (1991, p. 9).
