Abstract
This dataset contains 2,818 trait descriptive adjectives in English and information about the extent to which each term is known among a large and approximately representative sample of U.S. adults. The list of personality-related terms includes all 1,710 adjectives previously studied by Goldberg (1982) and draws on prior work by Allport and Odbert (1936) and Norman (1967). The extent to which terms were known by respondents was based on the administration of vocabulary questions about each term-definition pair online to a sample of English-speaking U.S. residents with approximately average literacy levels. The open data are accompanied by an online database that allows the terms to be searched and filtered.
Highlights
A foundational postulate in personality research – the “Lexical Hypothesis” – is that all relevant psychological differences between people are marked by linguistic descriptors
2.1 STUDY DESIGN The study design involved several distinct steps, including (1) aggregating a trait descriptive adjective set with 2,818 terms; (2) sourcing definitions for all of the terms; (3) creating multiple choice vocabulary questions based on each term-definition pair; (4) designing and completing survey-based data collection on the pool of questions; and (5) developing tools to disseminate results from the analyses of these data and other characteristics of the 2,818 trait descriptive adjectives (TDAs) set
Step 1: Aggregation of the 2,818 Trait Descriptive Adjectives Given the centrality of the 1,710 item TDA set derived by Goldberg and Norman, the TDA set reported on in this work is a super-set of those terms
Summary
A foundational postulate in personality research – the “Lexical Hypothesis” – is that all relevant psychological differences between people are marked by linguistic descriptors. A major benefit of this lexical approach is that it helps to constrain the scope of differences between people, as differences that cannot be succinctly described are presumed to be less salient This logic has led to the development of several widely used assessment models in personality, each based on data collected from self-ratings and ratings of others using subsets of these descriptors [2, 9, 14, 18, 21, 22]. Norman [15] took a more exhaustive approach He supplemented Allport and Odbert’s list with new terms, culled terms he deemed obscure, broad, nonpsychological in nature, evaluative, or classified as quantifiers of degree (rather than directly descriptive). We sought to provide an open and accessible database of terms to encourage further use among psychology researchers
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