You may want to look into the crisis in personality psychology which was sparked by Walter Mischel’s (1968) book “Personality and assessment”. There were a lot of studies, and arguments between researchers, about questions like these.
Mischel’s challenge: there are often low-seeming correlations between broad personality measures and specific behaviors.
Part of the response was that the correlations are much larger if you aggregate across many behaviors, e.g. instead of the correlation between an abstract rating of conscientiousness and how much a person engages in a single specific conscientious-related behavior, look at the correlation between an abstract rating of conscientiousness and the average of how much a person engages in 50 specific conscientiousness-related behaviors. Which suggests that there is some sort of broad trend that the person carries, even if any one behavior depends on a mix of things beyond that broad trend.
Mischel argued for also looking for narrower patterns that are more stable for a person rather than just these broad traits, e.g. a person might pretty consistently be talkative with their friends, even if they don’t consistently engage in some other extraversion-related behaviors.
One thing to add is, one way you can interpret my “correlation with lexical notion” is as saying “what happens when we average infinitely many behaviors?”. Since all the traits had a high “correlation with lexical notion”, it seems I got the same result as the personality researchers.
You may want to look into the crisis in personality psychology which was sparked by Walter Mischel’s (1968) book “Personality and assessment”. There were a lot of studies, and arguments between researchers, about questions like these.
Mischel’s challenge: there are often low-seeming correlations between broad personality measures and specific behaviors.
Part of the response was that the correlations are much larger if you aggregate across many behaviors, e.g. instead of the correlation between an abstract rating of conscientiousness and how much a person engages in a single specific conscientious-related behavior, look at the correlation between an abstract rating of conscientiousness and the average of how much a person engages in 50 specific conscientiousness-related behaviors. Which suggests that there is some sort of broad trend that the person carries, even if any one behavior depends on a mix of things beyond that broad trend.
Mischel argued for also looking for narrower patterns that are more stable for a person rather than just these broad traits, e.g. a person might pretty consistently be talkative with their friends, even if they don’t consistently engage in some other extraversion-related behaviors.
Sounds neat, I will have to take a look.
One thing to add is, one way you can interpret my “correlation with lexical notion” is as saying “what happens when we average infinitely many behaviors?”. Since all the traits had a high “correlation with lexical notion”, it seems I got the same result as the personality researchers.