ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst of interest by scientists studying personality traits in the most fundamental problem of the field—the search for a scientifically compelling taxonomy of individual differences. More importantly, a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic representation. As a consequence, the scientific study of personality dispositions, which had been in the doldrums in the 1970s, 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.
