Lexical Hypothesis

Lexical Hypothesis

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

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

What it is

Sorting the trait words of a language by which ones travel together should therefore reveal the main dimensions of personality. Lewis Goldberg's 1990 work grouped 1,431 trait adjectives into 75 clusters and found a nearly identical five-factor structure across ten replications.

In effect

In the article on the Big Five personality traits, it explains where the five dimensions came from.

What it does not say

It concerns how trait words group together. It does not say that language captures every difference between people, or that five dimensions are the only possible description.

Sources

  1. Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative description of personality: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216-1229.