Abstract
Over the past 40 years, the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) of personality has inspired a proliferation of self-report scales, potentially creating ‘jingle-jangle’ fallacies and a fragmented empirical literature. The Big Five personality taxonomy may offer a useful organising framework for these scales, as it seems plausible that many could be represented as narrow facets of the broader Big Five domains. Across two studies, we explored (Study 1, N = 408) then attempted to confirm (Study 2, N = 423) whether and where a collection of >25 RST scales might be located within the space of the Big Five. Both studies revealed that more than 70% of these RST scales were more strongly related to the Big Five domains than more than 10% (i.e., 3/30) of Big Five facets, suggesting that they too could plausibly be regarded as Big Five facets. Moreover, several RST scales were highly correlated ( r > .80) with individual Big Five facets, indicating potential redundancy. These results suggest that the Big Five can indeed provide a useful organising framework for most RST scales, which may help researchers grappling with construct proliferation and jingle-jangle fallacies within the RST literature.
Published Version
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