The General Factor of Personality: A Hierarchical Life History Model

Abstract

Building on evolutionary models of personality proposed in the first edition of the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , this chapter considers the evolutionary significance of a relatively new higher‐order personality construct, the so‐called general factor of personality (GFP). The history of the construct is reviewed, along with a large portion of the recent theoretical literature addressing the existence and nature of the GFP and the empirical literaturerelevant to that. Finally, a review and evaluation is conducted of various recent attempts to develop and test a hierarchical

The General Factor of Personality

“…Since the introductory study, a great deal of research has been dedicated to the higher-order factors of personality, including GFP, and to the structural hierarchy of personality (Figueredo et al, 2004;Figueredo, Vásquez, Brumbach, & Schneider, 2007;Figueredo, Woodley, & Jacobs, 2016;Hirschi, 2008;Just, 2011;Loehlin & Martin, 2011;Musek, 2007Musek, , 2009Musek, , 2010Musek, , 2011Musek, , 2017Petrides et al, 2010;Rushton, Bons, & Hur, 2008Rushton & Irwing, 2008van der Linden, Bakker, & Serlie, 2011;van der Linden, Nijenhuis, & Bakker, 2010;van der Linden, Nijenhuis, Cremers, & van de Ven, 2011;van der Linden et al, , 2014van der Linden et al, , 2015Vecchione, Alessandri, Barbaranelli, & Caprara, 2011;Veselka et al, 2009aVeselka et al, , 2009b.…”

Methodologically Sound: Evaluating the Psychometric Approach to the Assessment of Human Life History [Reply to ]

“…Actively self-selecting into and occasionally even constructing situations and environments that provide the settings for one's agreeable behavior will also necessarily reduce the temporal, material, and bioenergetic resources that are allocated towards other fitness-enhancing domains. The same general argument can be made for any of the other Big Five personality traits (and has already been in Figueredo et al, in press). If the “possession” of personality traits consumes resources to produce elaborate behavioral extended phenotypes, we can only conclude that personality traits are components of a higher-order LH strategy ancestrally selected to optimize the tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of the behaviors.…”

“…As with other fitness components, however, the development and behavioral enactment of personality traits require the expenditure of material and bioenergetic resources for the observable indicators of personality to outwardly manifest (Figueredo, Woodley of Menie, and Jacobs, in press). For example, Agreeableness is a personality trait that requires an outward behavioral manifestation consistent with the verbal adjectives participants utilize in both self- and peer-report measures.…”

“…As a result, any organismic resources allocated toward personality traits should be invested in a manner that ancestrally produced higher fitness returns on investment by strategically distributing resources across multiple fitness domains. The magnitudes of these fitness returns, in relation to the costs of the investments, may be highly contingent on the ecology in which the individual resides (for a more explicit model of these quantitative relations, see Figueredo et al, in press). …”

The Experimenting Society

“…This means that such changing environmental contexts cannot logically be held responsible for the cross-temporal stability of traits, and only any cross-temporal stability that may exist across varying environmental contexts could reasonably be held accountable for the cross-temporal stability of traits (as also demonstrated by Bratko & Butkovic, 2007). Exactly how much crosstemporal stability of environmental contexts exists across the human lifespan, and whether this is sufficient to explain the stability of traits, is a matter for future empirical research to estimate (see Figueredo, Woodley, & Jacobs, 2014). Nevertheless, the single common causal influence that is unquestionably persistent over time is the individual's genome (meaning DNA nucleotide sequence).…”