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Various psychologists have defined traits differently over the years. Fundamentally, traits are dimensions of psychological differences among people, including cognitive abilities, information processing, worldviews, values, goals, strivings, attachment styles, hobbies, habits, behavioral tics, and more. This definition, therefore, excludes differences that are not psychological and/or stable. This definition works well with existing personality assessment frameworks. However, in practice, traits can be defined far more broadly than what these assessment tools assess, depending on what the researchers want to focus their attention on. Extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, are some examples of personality traits.

Nowadays, the most common theories and assessment tools emphasize the hierarchical structure of personality. In fact, the hierarchical representation of traits has been a by-product of the development and refinement of these tools. For the trait hierarchy to have both theoretical and methodological relevance, the authors have based their procedures on the notion that personality traits themselves can be organized hierarchically. Hierarchical organization means that the traits at the top (domains) can be broken down into aspects and facets. For example, extraversion (domain) can be broken down into enthusiasm and assertiveness (aspects). Each of these aspects could have several facets.

Researchers refer to the highest personality hierarchy level as the Big Few, which includes the Big Five and the HEXACO domains. The Big Five, or the Five-Factor Model consists of traits such as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. They are usually referred to as OCEAN. The HEXACO model retains much of the Big Five, but redefines some of the personality factors and adds a sixth. It consists of Honest-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, calls for an explicit focus on lower levels. This design starts at the specific elements of the hierarchy and then moves to the general. There are many reasons why the bottom-up approach in personality hierarchy might be more useful than the existing top-down model.

Traditionally, researchers put more emphasis on the higher levels of personality hierarchy (domains and aspects) and utilize the top-down model, which means starting from the general elements and narrowing it down to more specific ones, just like it happens with extraversion. This means that very little attention is given to facets. In taxonomy, two or more objects are said to share the same “level” when they have approximately the same rank or importance.

Personality traits are tacitly ranked based on their breadth, which is why the traits at the higher level of the hierarchy are broad and contain multiple lower-level traits. In theory, unlike the traits at the highest levels of the hierarchy, the narrow traits should be unidimensional and refer to singular characteristics. In practice, however, the assessment tools mix broader and narrower traits within levels instead of separating them.

As shown in Figure 1, existing hierarchies proceed down from the Domains to the Aspects and Facets. No clear criteria have been introduced by far to define these levels, especially below the level of Domains. Additionally, more research needs to be done in this area to determine to what extent these traits overlap among themselves or exhaust the traits that are potentially identifiable for that level.

Figure 1 in the previous question illustrates the issue of jingle/jangle fallacies in trait hierarchy. This means that different trait labels often refer to overlapping content, and the same labels refer to different content. For example, as the figure shows, several constructs (such as Assertiveness, order, Volatility, and Compassion) are both Aspects and Facets, whereas Openness is both a Domain and an Aspect. On the other hand, labels such as Liveliness, Energy-Level, and Activity Level are used for essentially the same facets. Employing the traditional top-down approach to personality hierarchy naturally increases the chances of such inconsistencies. This is because once researchers focus primarily on the domains, the lower levels of the hierarchy end up becoming more ill-defined and intuitive rather than empirically-based.

The issue of jingle and jangle can be exposed by developing a new hierarchy from the bottom up. Researchers will give different labels to traits with different lower-level constituent parts, and if a newly proposed trait has the same constituent as an existing one, it will not be advanced at all. In this way, researchers will use empirical, scientific methods to decide if two traits have overlapping or distinct content. As a result, the process will be based less on researchers’ intuitions.

Another issue with the current personality taxonomy is that it is unclear if the available inventories fully cover the trait on all levels. For example, it is difficult to judge if the NEO Personality Inventory comprehensively covers every possible facet of a trait. When using the top-down approach, there is a possibility that some facets will be left out of the hierarchy, as researchers try to fit every facet into one of the domains. As a result, it becomes impossible to expand the model and its content, even at lower levels. The development of a completely new hierarchy from the bottom-up could counter these problems.

Evidence suggests that many items in the hierarchy contain unique personality traits that are narrower than facets, aspects, and domains. These narrow traits have been called nuances. Nuances are the lowest level at which patterns of responses to items continue to have reliable specific variance. They are similar to item by definition and are sometimes understood by participants as being synonymous. However, the nuance level is broader than the level of items. If a set of items contains no reliably distinct information from one another, they will be considered alternative indicators of the same nuance. In summary, nuances can be viewed as the lowest identifiable level of the personality trait hierarchy and are the constituents that make up all higher-order traits.

It has been suggested that “trait descriptors are not neatly clustered in multivariate space.” Instead, they are distributed like stars in the night sky. That is, organizing even the most basic units with neat symmetric hierarchical nesting is quite a challenge. Alternatives include non-nested hierarchies and non-hierarchical structures.

A nested hierarchy also referred to as inclusion hierarchy, is a system similar to the matryoshka dolls, where each doll is encompassed by the other. A nested hierarchy can also be called a holarchy, which is a connection between holons, where a holon is both a part and a whole. For instance, atoms are encompassed by molecules, which are encompassed by cells, tissues, organs, and the organism.

This is different from non-nested hierarchies, where the higher-level item does not include the items below. An example of this is the military rank, where the general is a separate entity and does not consist of lieutenant and brigadier.

It might be more useful to completely disregard the hierarchies and use lists instead. Usually, when researchers extract a new personality factor during the analysis, they regard it as a part of the existing trait. However, factor analysis might be extracting a completely new factor, which should be considered separate from the existing traits. Therefore, organizing personality traits in the form of a list might be more appropriate than using any form of hierarchy.

Nested hierarchies come with a lot of advantages. Data reduction techniques, such as factor, component, and cluster analyses have been embraced for decades and enable the reduction of the vast diversity in individual psychological differences down to manageable numbers. This approach has been repeatedly used to develop omnibus top-down trait hierarchies and evaluations of specific domains. First, a small number of traits are identified, followed by factoring of constituent variables in each.

The bottom-up framework proposed in the article and the procedures associated with it do not assume any specific organizational structure. The authors suggest that a strictly nested hierarchical representation of traits might be implausible due to many-to-many links between traits at different hierarchical levels. Instead, they aim to form a comprehensive set of fundamental constituent traits, which can be organized into various structures – broader and narrower, nested and non-nested.

While the authors agree that personality involves more than an individual’s survey response profile such as direct behavioral observations, they also claim that many of the best-established personality science findings are based on surveys, including self-reports and informant-reports. Thus, their suggested procedures for developing a bottom-up hierarchy begin with the assumption that data collection will be based on survey methodology.

The authors view the survey methodology as a key limitation of the proposed procedures. While acknowledging that personality psychology has become overly reliant on the sued of surveys and calls for greater use of observational techniques, other assessment methods should not be excluded. As alternatives, natural language processing enables the extraction of clues about personality from all types of text, whereas digital footprint data enables researchers to observe behavioral expression virtually.

Figure 1 illustrates the issue of jingle/jangle fallacies in trait hierarchy. This means that different trait labels often refer to overlapping content, and the same labels refer to different content. For example, as the figure shows, several constructs (such as Assertiveness, order, Volatility, and Compassion) are both Aspects and Facets, whereas Openness is both a Domain and an Aspect. On the other hand, labels such as Liveliness, Energy-Level, and Activity Level are used for essentially the same facets. Employing the traditional top-down approach to personality hierarchy naturally increases the chances of such inconsistencies. This is because once researchers focus primarily on the domains, the lower levels of the hierarchy end up becoming more ill-defined and intuitive rather than empirically-based.

The issue of jingle and jangle can be exposed by developing a new hierarchy from the bottom up. Researchers will give different labels to traits with different lower-level constituent parts, and if a newly proposed trait has the same constituent as an existing one, it will not be advanced at all. In this way, researchers will use empirical, scientific methods to decide if two traits have overlapping or distinct content. As a result, the process will be based less on researchers’ intuitions.

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