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Towards a Taxonomy of Personality Descriptors

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Personality Psychology

Abstract

Personality psychology has not yet established a generally accepted, systematic framework for distinguishing, ordering, and naming individual differences in people’s behavior and experience. Such a systematic framework is generally called a taxonomy. In biology, for example, the Linnean taxonomy established an orderly classification of plants and animals and a standard nomenclature. The availability of this initial taxonomy has been a tremendous asset for biologists: it has permitted researchers to study specified classes of instances instead of examining separately every individual instance, and it has served to facilitate the communication and accumulation of empirical findings about these classes and their instances.

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© 1989 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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John, O.P. (1989). Towards a Taxonomy of Personality Descriptors. In: Buss, D.M., Cantor, N. (eds) Personality Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0634-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0634-4_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-0636-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-0634-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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