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A 3-D Look at the Russian Personality Traits Structure

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Abstract

Attempts to account for most important differences in personality by applying factor analysis to long lists of personality trait variables led to extraction of 5 or 6 orthogonal factorial dimensions. The present paper addresses an issue of more parsimonious three-dimensional visualization of a set of 6 factorial dimensions. Russian speaking respondents used the lists of 496 and 296 personality-relevant nouns for judging 1242 and 447 peoples, respectively. To visualize 6 factorial dimensions of the personality traits structure, a three-dimensional rugby (ball) cake model was suggested and examined by comparison of model-predicted and observed patterns of correlation of each noun with 6 factorial scales. Each noun was linked to one of 43 narrow personality traits predicted by the rugby cake shape. A shorter list of nouns was selected for exemplifying each pole of these traits and all these nouns were evenly written on the surface of the rugby cake shape. Topological features of such three-dimensional shape provided an explanation of failure to reduce 5–6 factorial dimensions to just three spatial dimensions by means of a pure empirical analysis of either loadings of trait variables on these dimensions or their correlations with them.

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Acknowledgement

I thank Olga G. Donskaya and Dmitriy Putilov for their help in questionnaire data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics, 2, Timakova Street, Novosibirsk, 630117, Russia

    Arcady A. Putilov

  2. 11, Nipkowstr., 12489, Berlin, Germany

    Arcady A. Putilov

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  1. Arcady A. Putilov
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Correspondence to Arcady A. Putilov.

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Conflict of Interest

The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Funding

These studies were funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant numbers 07–06-00263-а, 10–06-00114-а, 13–06-00042-a, and 16–06-00235-a), and the Russian Foundation for Humanities (grant numbers 06–06-00375-a, 12–06-18,001-e, and 15–06-10,403-a).

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in these studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments. Informed consent was obtained from all respondents included in the study.

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Putilov, A.A. A 3-D Look at the Russian Personality Traits Structure. Curr Psychol 37, 528–542 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9535-y

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