Trait Perspective

       In my opinion, the trait perspective is the best perspetive to studying personality. They do not try to explain why people act in the way they do, which I do not think is so necessary anyways. Rather, they try to explain what is happening and how people act and react in different situations. They say personality is about character traits and they look at what characteristics cause people to act in a certain way.
       Eysenck said that there are two major scales of personality traits or as he called them "super traits."He said that every single trait that you can think of falls under the scale of introverted to extroverted or stable to unstable. Gordon Allport said that there are common traits that are shared by every culture and individual traits that are unique to every individual. Cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits are a few types of individual traits. Cardinal traits are the most basic traits of a person, central traits are the next set of basic traits to a person's character, and secondary traits are those inconsistent and superficial characteristics that people possess. Raymond Cattell took a different stance. He used factor analysis in which he took a bunch of traits and boiled them down to the 16 most basic characteristics. He said that every single trait falls under those basic 16. He added that every single person possesses each of those traits to a certain extent. The fourth view that we learned was the CANOE/OCEAN personality. This view holds that there are five basic traits including openness to experience, conscientiousness, introversion/extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I like the Raymond Cattell view the best because I think it is the most realistic. I think that everyone has some amount of all 16 of those characteristics.