Personality Traits and Attitudes toward Traits: Relationships and Differences

According to the Five Factor Theory (McCrae & Costa, 2013), innate personality traits affect an objective biography after a characteristic adaptation. Attitudes toward traits are a reflexive kind of characteristic adaptations. Attitudes toward traits represent bipolar (positive vs. negative) evaluations of a psychological construct, stored in semantic memory, without reference to a particular person (Shchebetenko, 2014). The aim of this research is to study the validity of attitudes toward traits. As a result of an empirical study with a total sample of 1226 people, the structure of attitudes toward traits was obtained, generally repeating the five-factor structure of personality traits. All attitudes correlated with each other, correlation coefficient did not exceed r = .48, i.e., attitudes towards different traits are different, although related, phenomena. Strong correlations between openness, agreeableness, extraversion and the corresponding attitudes were discovered; moderate correlations between conscientiousness and the attitude to it were obtained; a weak correlation between neuroticism and the attitude toward it was found. Factor analysis showed that attitudes toward traits form one common factor. Structural modeling has demonstrated that theoretical hypotheses about the influence of personality traits, forming factors of Stability/Plasticity, on a single factor, formed by the attitudes toward traits, correspond to empirical data in general. The prospects of research are studies in another age group, and cross-cultural studies.