The DOI matches its Crossref record; 65 of the 65 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Trait explanations in personality psychology
Abstract
Recent debates on the status of contemporary trait psychology (Pervin, 1994) have revived old questions about the role of traits in the explanation of behavior: are traits mere descriptions of behavior, or do they offer one legitimate and useful form of explanation? We review the logic of trait explanation and present a general model of the person in which personality traits are hypothetical constructs regarded as basic dispositions. In interaction with external influences—notably shared meaning systems—traits contribute causally to the development of habits, attitudes, skills, and other characteristic adaptations. In this model, action and experience can be explained directly or proximally in terms of the interaction of the immediate situation with the individual's characteristic adaptations, and indirectly or distally in terms of underlying personality traits.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix.
Campbell, D. T., & Fiske, D. W. (1959) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/h0046016 · Cited by 17,116
An Introduction to the Five‐Factor Model and Its Applications
McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992) · Journal of Personality · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x · Cited by 6,835
Self-citationA psychobiological model of temperament and character
Cloninger, C. R. (1993) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1993.01820240059008 · Cited by 5,458
Madison, P., & Mischel, W. (1968) · The American Journal of Psychology · doi:10.2307/1421067 · Cited by 4,346
Handbook of personality theory and research
Wilson, G. (1991) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/0191-8869(91)90043-b · Cited by 3,538
Four ways five factors are basic
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/0191-8869(92)90236-i · Cited by 3,386
Self-citationEncyclopedia of human behavior
(1994) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.32-0638 · Cited by 3,234
Handbook of environmental psychology
Stokols, D., & Altman, I. (1987) · Wiley eBooks · Cited by 2,990
Influence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: Happy and unhappy people
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.38.4.668 · Cited by 2,652
Self-citationNorman, W. T. (1963) · The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/h0040291 · Cited by 2,485
Cited by
A meta-analytic examination of the goal orientation nomological net.
Payne, S. C., Youngcourt, S. S., & Beaubien, J. M. (2007) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/0021-9010.92.1.128 · Cited by 1,242
Kaya, F., Aydin, F., Schepman, A., Rodway, P., Yetişensoy, O., & Demir Kaya, M. (2024) · International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction · doi:10.1080/10447318.2022.2151730 · Cited by 688
Sex differences in psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder
Cale, E. M., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2002) · Clinical Psychology Review · doi:10.1016/s0272-7358(01)00125-8 · Cited by 395
Boyd, R. L., & Schwartz, H. A. (2021) · Journal of Language and Social Psychology · doi:10.1177/0261927x20967028 · Cited by 317
Lack of theory building and testing impedes progress in the factor and network literature
Fried, E. I. (2020) · Psychological Inquiry · doi:10.1080/1047840x.2020.1853461 · Cited by 317
Metadata
- Authors
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T.
- Venue
- European Journal of Personality
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1995-11
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 231-252
- ISSN
- 0890-2070 (ISSN-L)
- 1099-0984
- OpenAlex
- W2132200881
- Cited by
- 423
- References
- 65
- FWCI
- 8.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Trait explanations in personality psychology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/per.2410090402
- The paper
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1995). Trait explanations in personality psychology. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2410090402
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
