What trait theory claims

1. Trait theory explains personality as a set of stable characteristics that a person carries from one situation into the next.
2. Allport (1936) set out what kinds of trait exist and how much of a person each kind accounts for.
3. Cattell (1946) built a questionnaire that turns traits into scores, producing a profile of a whole personality.

Allport's three kinds of trait

1. Cardinal traits
   1. A cardinal trait is a single characteristic so dominant that nearly everything the person does can be traced back to it.
   2. Allport regarded cardinal traits as rare, because most people are not organised around one overriding quality.
2. Central traits
   1. Central traits are the small handful of characteristics that together describe most of an ordinary personality.
   2. They are the words you would reach for if you had to sum someone up, such as honest, anxious, generous or determined.
3. Secondary traits
   1. Secondary traits appear only in particular situations, so they are less consistent and less obvious to other people.
   2. Getting impatient in queues, or going quiet in large groups, sits at this level rather than at the central one.

Cattell's 16PF

1. Cattell started from the very large number of words people use to describe each other and looked for the pattern underneath them.
   1. He gathered ratings of people and used a statistical technique, factor analysis, which finds out which descriptions tend to rise and fall together.
   2. The visible descriptions are surface traits, while the deeper characteristics they point to are source traits.
2. The analysis reduced that mass of descriptions to 16 source traits, and those 16 are what the name 16PF refers to.
3. The 16PF itself is a questionnaire, and your answers to its items are scored on each of the 16 factors.
   1. Each factor runs between two opposite poles, such as reserved at one end and outgoing at the other, so your score places you somewhere between them.
4. The 16 scores are then plotted together as a personality profile, so a whole personality is described by a pattern of scores rather than by a single label.

Strengths of trait theory

1. A strength is that it is measurable, so personality can be studied with numbers instead of impressions, and findings can be checked and repeated by other researchers.
2. A second strength is that it has real uses, because questionnaires of this kind are used in settings such as job selection and careers guidance.

Weaknesses of trait theory

1. A weakness is that it describes personality without explaining it, because knowing that someone scores highly on a trait says nothing about where that trait came from.
2. A second weakness is that traits predict behaviour imperfectly, since the same person acts differently depending on the situation they are in.

Turning this into marks

1. Name Allport's cardinal, central and secondary traits, and Cattell's 16 source traits measured by the 16PF.
2. Attach a short example to each kind of trait.
3. The mark most often lost is saying that a weakness exists without saying why it matters for using the theory.