Folk-Concept Trait Scales

Thirty-three traits describe personality in the terms people use in ordinary life: Responsibility, Sociability, Self-Control, Dutifulness, Dominance, Tolerance, Poise, Optimism, Insight, Planfulness, Intellect, Adventurousness, Sentimentality, Timidity and others. Statements describe each in plain language, so the traits correspond closely to the way friends and colleagues might describe one another.

Gough (1987) built the California Psychological Inventory around what he called folk concepts, the interpersonal qualities that people in all societies recognize and use to understand one another, rather than around abstract dimensions derived purely from statistics. These scales follow that approach with items from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999).

Each trait is scored separately. Higher scores describe a stronger version of the trait; lower scores describe its absence or opposite. Because many traits overlap in meaning, the profile is best read for its overall pattern, with attention to where closely related traits, such as Dominance and Assertiveness, agree or differ.

The scales are used in research on everyday personality description and in counseling and personal development. On this site, the Narrow-Trait Composites offer an even finer description, the Abridged Big Five Circumplex (AB5C) describes traits as blends of broad factors, and the Mini-IPIP describes the five broad domains.

Gough organized the CPI (first published in 1957) around what he called folk concepts: dimensions of interpersonal functioning that ordinary observers already recognize and name — dominance, responsibility, tolerance, self-control. Rather than deriving scales from factor analysis, he favored building them against real-world criteria, so that a scale earned its name by predicting how people who know the respondent would actually describe them (Gough, 1957, 1987).

The inventory became one of the most widely used measures of normal personality of the twentieth century, reaching its third edition in 1996 (Gough & Bradley, 1996). When five-factor researchers later mapped the CPI's folk scales onto the Big Five, they found systematic — though far from one-to-one — correspondences, locating Gough's criterion-first tradition inside the modern trait taxonomy (McCrae, Costa, & Piedmont, 1993).

Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim.

“Acknowledge others' accomplishments.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.