Project Summary
- Introduction
Aiming to examine perceptions of salient personality characteristics, a salient personality descriptor survey was conducted in searching for new personality insights by comparing the already established personality trait theory, Eysenck’s Theory and the Big Five Theory.
- Method
An online survey (See appendix – A) was created for the length of ten days time with the website “Survey Monkey”, and obtained 64 responses. In hoping to obtain a more focused response pattern and simplicity, university students were the chosen group to attempt this survey. Before entering the survey, interviewees were asked to indicate their sex and age. Male composed 41 of the responses and 23 of them were by female, with the age distribution of the 64 from 19 years old to 24 years old. They were asked to name 10 pairs of salient personality descriptors in the order of importance, with two examples provided.
- The Results
As for the results, there were no dominant descriptors occupying any of the top 3 spots of the pairs, but despite the large number of descriptors obtained, a total of 640 pairs, there were also a noticeable overlap of data. There were around over 8 pairs of descriptors receiving over 30 counts (See Appendix – B), while the pair Nice v. Rude reached 54 counts, 84% of the participants believe that Nice and Rude is at least top ten of the most important descriptors in personality. Calm v. Moody, Harding Working v. Lazy and Happy v. Unhappy were pairs, which also reached the 50s, receiving 53, 51 and 51 counts respectively. These results are to be categorized into different dimensions in the later sections.
- Trait Theories
Before moving onto the dimensions, attention should first be put on trait theories. Trait theory is one of the most popular theory in studying personality, theorists of such are primarily interested in the