ABSTRACT
‘A “trait” is a determining tendency or a predisposition to respond.’ In some respects everyone is a trait theorist, in that we note consistencies in other people’s behaviour and we label them accordingly as aggressive, lazy, shy or by one of the other 18,000 words which exist in English to describe human behaviour. A typical factor analytic investigation of personality would involve the collection of a wide variety of measures from a large number of subjects. The investigator would then calculate the correlation coefficients between all the different measures. In formulating his theory of personality Cattell assumes that there are natural elements of personality which can be discovered by the technique of multivariate analysis. In this procedure, a large number of naturally occurring aspects of human behaviour are sampled in an attempt to unravel complex interrelationships and uncover the basic building blocks of personality.
