Lewis Goldberg

Who they are

The work of Lewis Goldberg reaches this site through the papers listed below. On this site the name is tied to Lexical Hypothesis, The Five-Factor Model.

Key papers

Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative description of personality: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216-1229. What it reports: 1,431 trait adjectives grouped into 75 clusters gave nearly identical five-factor structures across ten replications, and a smaller set of common trait terms gave the same structure in self-rating and peer-rating samples.

Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345. What it reports: Compared personality traits, socioeconomic status and cognitive ability as predictors of life outcomes in prospective longitudinal studies and found the effects of personality comparable to those of the other two.

Key ideas

Lexical Hypothesis: The idea that differences between people that matter in daily life are encoded in everyday language.

The Five-Factor Model: The mainstream structural model of personality, which describes people on five continuous dimensions rather than sorting them into kinds: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

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