The DOI matches its Crossref record; 62 of the 62 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A theoretical basis for the major dimensions of personality
Abstract
We argue that lexical studies of personality structure suggest the existence of six major dimensions of personality: (I) Surgency, (II) Agreeableness, (III) Conscientiousness, (IV) Emotional Stability, (V) Intellect/Imagination, and (VI) Honesty. We then propose a two‐part theoretical basis for these dimensions. First, Honesty and rotated variants of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability are interpreted in terms of three traits—fairness/non‐exploitation, forgiveness/non‐retaliation, and empathy/attachment—that underlie prosocial versus antisocial tendencies. Second, the Surgency, Conscientiousness, and Intellect/Imagination factors are interpreted as traits that involve active engagement within three domains of endeavour—social, task‐related, and idea‐related endeavour. Predictions that follow from these interpretations are tested and found to be supported. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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
The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Hamilton, W. D. (1964) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4 · Cited by 15,725
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
Trivers, R. L. (1971) · The Quarterly Review of Biology · doi:10.1086/406755 · Cited by 11,010
Journal of personality and social psychology
Armstrong, J. S. (1988) · International Journal of Forecasting · doi:10.1016/0169-2070(88)90126-4 · Cited by 10,485
An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure.
Goldberg, L. R. (1990) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037//0022-3514.59.6.1216 · Cited by 6,652
Nielsen, R. P., & Axelrod, R. (1985) · The Academy of Management Review · doi:10.2307/257983 · Cited by 6,321
The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure
Goldberg, L. R. (1992) · Psychological Assessment · doi:10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26 · Cited by 5,530
The structure of phenotypic personality traits.
Goldberg, L. R. (1993) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.48.1.26 · Cited by 4,816
(1970) · Elsevier eBooks · doi:10.1016/c2013-0-10497-7 · Cited by 2,865
Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974) · Journal of Abnormal Psychology · doi:10.1037/h0036681 · Cited by 2,196
A strategy of win-stay, lose-shift that outperforms tit-for-tat in the Prisoner's Dilemma game
Nowak, M., & Sigmund, K. (1993) · Nature · doi:10.1038/364056a0 · Cited by 1,797
Cited by
Personality Development: Stability and Change
Caspi, A., Roberts, B. W., & Shiner, R. L. (2005) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141913 · Cited by 2,699
Empirical, Theoretical, and Practical Advantages of the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure
Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007) · Personality and Social Psychology Review · doi:10.1177/1088868306294907 · Cited by 2,171
Self-citationPsychometric Properties of the HEXACO Personality Inventory
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004) · Multivariate Behavioral Research · doi:10.1207/s15327906mbr3902_8 · Cited by 1,961
Self-citationThe Dark Triad of personality: A 10 year review
Furnham, A., Richards, S. C., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013) · Social and Personality Psychology Compass · doi:10.1111/spc3.12018 · Cited by 1,619
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., Perugini, M., Szarota, P., de Vries, R. E., Di Blas, L., Boies, K., & De Raad, B. (2004) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.86.2.356 · Cited by 1,044
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K.
- Venue
- European Journal of Personality
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2001-09
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 327-353
- ISSN
- 0890-2070 (ISSN-L)
- 1099-0984
- OpenAlex
- W1999807377
- Cited by
- 608
- References
- 62
- FWCI
- 7.69
- 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: A theoretical basis for the major dimensions of personality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/per.417
- The paper
- Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2001). A theoretical basis for the major dimensions of personality. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.417
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.