Personality Traits Structuring Can Lead to Uncovering Its Adaptive Function

Abstract

There exists a clear distinguishable personality variation along a big amount of dimensions, such as dependability, honesty, cooperativeness, generousness, humorousness, friendliness, competitiveness, and so on. The practice of classification of trait words indicates that each original list consisting of hundreds of these words of personality lexicon can be replaced by 5-6 broad factorial dimensions. Usually, the personality psychologists do not explain the nature of such empirically derived personality traits structures. Instead, they often stress that neither theory is supported by such factorial models of personality traits structure due to their pure empirical origin. The author proposed a three-dimensional (“rugby cake”) model allowing the replacement of a six-factor representation of personality traits structure by a more parsimonious representation with only three spatial (underlying) dimensions named Advantageousness (A), Benignity (B), and Controllability (C). In the present paper he proposed that the human capability to distinguish between numerous personality traits dimensions evolved as an essential life skill determined by a relatively autonomous, automatic, and specialized computational device. This device makes nearly everyone well enough in navigating between hundreds of narrow personality traits dimensions without much effort and outside of awareness. People can unconsciously organize the personality perception process in the framework of a very parsimonious three-dimensional ABC system. It provides a sense to which extent a particular narrow personality trait is advantageous (A), benign (B), and controlled (C) to solve the adaptive problems of predicting and controlling others’ behavior via perception, classification, judgment, and signaling of fitness correlated personality traits.