Personality is the complex of characteristics that distinguishes an individual. Less formally, X's personality attempts to provider an answer to the following questions:
One's personality arises from both biological and environmental factors. There are also different interpretations of how we should think about personality. Psychometricians are correct in noting that modern techniques of developing statistical models of personality are relatively stable across cultures and are predictive.
Modern personality models are generated by doing large-scale objective testing. The first step is to define what personality means so that it can be properly modeled. Generally, studies operate on the premise that personality seeks to answer the questions listed at the beginning of this article. The psychometricians will ask random samples of people to generate questions others can be asked that conform to this specification. For instance, generated questions may be:
Once the sample of people have generated thousands of questions, randomly shuffled samples of these question are given to tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Through regression analysis, correlations in answers can be found in the data between different questions. The higher correlated the questions, the more similar the questions are. 1:1 correlation would be the same question.
Questions whose answers don't correlate with other questions are not useful in the analysis. Once the correlating questions are grouped, they can be labeled objectively, such as A, B, C, etc. A, B, and C are considered factors of personality. These labels aren't particularly descriptive of what the factors actually mean. Listing out the questions of group A may yield:
It may be useful to label this factor something like extroversion. This is how we can use subjective nomenclature to label objective factors of personality.
The most widely applicable statistical model of personality is called the Big Five model. Its factors and sub-factors can be stratified in the following way: