Cattell: Personality Model (16 FP)

Cattell’s model is undoubtedly one of the most famous and his attempt to describe personality has come down to us through his famous test, the 16 PF. Of course, the original version of Cattell himself is not used today, but much of the initial spirit of the test is maintained.

On the other hand, Cattell stands out for having proposed two types of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence would be closer to the current concept of intelligence. For example, we would use it when solving logic problems in which the experience of the person matters little, but their expertise to work with the challenge itself. The crystallized intelligence would collect all the experience of the person and would serve to answer questions and problems essentially related to memory.

Since the subject of intelligence and Cattell’s development of it is very interesting, in this article we are going to focus on his interesting model on personality and on the questionnaire used to apply it, the 16 PF.

Cattell and the 16 PF

The study of personality has been one of the most controversial in psychology. This kind of property of the self, conditioned by the environment and its genetics, has given rise to countless models that have fought for hegemony.

Not only has the origin of personality (genetics-environment) been discussed, but there is also an open debate about the extent to which personality can mutate or influence a person’s behavior. Another interesting debate regarding personality is related to its division, segmentation and dynamics.

In this sense, we can consider Cattell as a synthesizer of the work done by British and American authors in the field of basic mental and personality skills. Both for the scientific study of intelligence and for the scientific study of personality, he used a very powerful methodology for the time. Its objective was to isolate different primary factors.

For his studies, he used three sources as data collection techniques.

• Q (questionnaires).
• L (ratings or interviews).
• T (objective test).

Methodologically, his work is characterized as a serious and rigorous attempt to analyze and build a solid, stable and reliable model from the three sources that we have listed. In addition, the development of your model can be understood in three phases:

• First phase : part of nothing more and nothing less than 171 personality traits. He identified this vast number of traits from the even longer list Allport and Odbert had made a few years earlier. In this peculiar list, these two curious people included all the terms related to personality that he had found in the two main English dictionaries of the time.
• Second phase : it focused on the information obtained in the qualifications or interviews to try to give a theoretical content to these factors.
• Third phase : used the information from questionnaires (Q) and objective tests (T). At the end of all the content and mathematical analysis he concluded that there are 16 personality factors, dimensions in which we can all be classified in some way. Mathematically they are the logical product of a first order factor analysis. These would present in a bipolar manner:
  1. Emotional expressiveness (high-low).
  2. Intelligence (high-low).
  3. Stability (strength of the I-weakness of the I).
  4. Dominance (dominance-submission).
  5. Impulsivity (emergence / impulse-desurgence).
  6. Group conformity (strong superego-weak superego).
  7. Daring (parmia / daring-trectia / shyness)
  8. Sensitivity (premsia / sensitivity-harria / hardness).
  9. Suspicion (alexia / trust-protection / mistrust).
  10. Imagination (praxemia / pragmatism-autia / imagination).
  11. Cunning (subtlety / naivety).
  12. Guilt (conscience-imperturbability).
  13. Rebellion (radicalism-conservatism).
  14. Self-reliance (self-reliance / dependency).
  15. Self-control (self-esteem / indifference).
  16. Tension (tension-tranquility).

Second-order factors in the 16 FP

The personality factors that we have listed would not be independent (orthogonal), but would present positive and negative correlations, giving rise to other basic factors (second order factors):

• QS1. Introversion Vs Extraversion.
• QS2. Little anxiety Vs A lot of anxiety (tranquility).
• QS3. Susceptibility Vs Tenacity.
• QS4. Dependence Vs Independence.

From these first and second order factors related to personality, Cattell created one of the most famous and longest running questionnaires in history. On the other hand, Cattell classifies these personality traits by two dimensions:

• Its origin : hereditary Vs environmental.
• Its content : temperamental, motivational and interests.

Thus, this author and researcher already defended an idea that today is still accepted by most specialists in the study of personality. This idea is what states that the composition of an individual’s personality is the product of his genetics and the environment in which he has developed it.

Finally, it should be noted that to control possible anomalies in the responses, the 16 PF uses four scales: response style scale (reliability and validity), image manipulation (to control social desirability), acquiescence (to control the trend to give the same answer regardless of the question), infrequency index or chance index (to detect those questionnaires that have been answered at random and invalidate them: it is based on the consistency of the answers within each factor).

Merits of Cattell

The merits of Cattell can be divided into two large branches, almost intimately united. On the one hand, there is his intention to measure with precision or give mathematical form to a model, in this case of personality. A difficult task without a doubt, since we are talking about a construct that can only be measured indirectly.

Furthermore, in these measurements there is almost always a contaminating variable : in the majority of questionnaires or psychometric tests (with acceptable validity and reliability, as in the case of the 16 PF) it is the subject who issues a judgment to answer what they ask. In this sense, let us think that self-perception often has little to do with reality.

To explain this I have in my memory an example that, apart from being ironic, is as clear as it is human. It is a memory: that of walking down the street and hearing how two ladies called each other stubborn, repeatedly and incessantly, without either of them recognizing this trait in themselves. Paradoxical right? Well, this same paradox also appears when we answer many personality tests.

The second great merit of Cattell has to do with the articulation of his model. History, although sometimes it is wrong, is usually a good filter for humanity to leave behind all those useless occurrences or crazy ideas that constitute a dead end. This has not happened with the Cattell model and the best proof of this is that, to pay a small tribute to him, today we wanted to dedicate this article to him.