Lexical hypothesis
The Sedimentationshypothese, lexical hypothesis or lexical approach called, in psychology, the assumption that all the important personality traits are commonly represented by adjectives of the language.
One assumes that the human languages or merchandise for all personal characteristics that are significant, interesting or useful, have developed special words over time. With the importance of individual differences in personality it also increased the likelihood that the language brought forth a separate word. The collection of the concepts of the language area with which individual differences can be described should cover the range of relevant individual differences.
It is one of the most important and most used scientific theories of differential and personality psychology.
Among other things, the Big Five personality traits were obtained from a lexical analysis. Out of thousands of adjectives to describe the personality psychologists have determined using statistical method, the crucial dimensions. The concept works well in children and in other cultures.
Early conjecture
The Sedimentationshypothese was first formulated by Francis Galton (1884 ) to some extent.
" I tried to gain an idea of the number of the more conspicuous aspects of the character by counting in at Appropriate dictionary the words used to express them ... I Examined many pages of its index here and there as samples of the whole, and estimated did it fully contained one thousand words expressive of character, each nominal real Has a separate shade of meaning, while each shares a large part of its meaning with some of the rest. "
Investigations
Beginning ( Germanic Languages )
Justified by the history of science of psychology, the first studies on Galton's ideas in the Anglo - American region were performed, and accordingly, to Germanic languages.
The first systematic compilation lexical output data comes from Gordon Allport and Henry Sebastian Odbert (1936 ), who searched the approximately 550,000 words from Webster's New International Dictionary of 1925 after adjectives, participles and nouns, described the personality dispositions.
Corresponded Even after exclusion of nouns, the identical adjectives (eg anxiety - anxious ) and dialectal variants, still resulted in a list of 17,953 words, but including many rare, can be understood only by a few English speakers. The resulting list they ranked in 4 categories:
- Generalized and personal dispositions - consistent and stable modes of adaptation of a person to their environment (eg sociable, aggressive, scary - 4,504 words )
- States, moods and activities (eg, happy, sad, excited - 4,541 words )
- Highly evaluative assessments of personal reputation (eg excellent, valuable, on average - 5,226 words )
- Physical characteristics and can not be allocated ( 3,682 words )
On this list, put different reduction methods for obtaining input data for factor analysis.
Raymond Bernard Cattell went by the terms of the first category ( plus 100 in the second category ) and reduced this in several steps to 35 bipolar cluster (see cluster analysis).
Warren T. Norman reduced the list of Allport and Odbert on 2,800 more commonly used adjectives in the absence of health-related indicators (eg sickly ) and highly valued designations (eg excellent, malignant).
Lewis Goldberg again extended and reduced the list in several steps of the classification and assessment by students to 339 adjectives were classified into 100 groups almost synonymous words.
For the German -speaking area searched Angleitner et al. Wahrigs German dictionary for adjectives that describe personality traits. There 5,092 adjectives were found and ultimately resulted in the self - assessments and the reputation a five-factor structure, the Anglo-American " Big Five " was broadly in line.
Not Germanic languages and later studies
- Chinese (Yang & Bond, 1990)
- Czech ( Hrebickova & Ostendorf, 1995)
- Hebrew ( Almagor et al., 1995)
- Hungarian ( Szirmak & DeRaad, 1994)
- Italian ( Di Blas & Forzi; Caprara & Perugini, 1998)
- Polish ( Szarota, 1995)
- Russian ( Shmelyov & Pokhilko, 1993)
- Turkish ( Somer & Goldberg, 1999)
Similar concepts
- Philosophy of ordinary language
A similar approach uses the philosophy of ordinary language: therefore, can knowledge through a detailed analysis of the everyday use of the language can be obtained.
- Phenomenological Psychology
Johannes Linschoten formulated: "It sits across me something. " Expression is a solidified making sense, a sediment and has in its sedimentation receive doxic value [ ... ] The danger that threatens the psychology, this dogma of doxic granted.
In the Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966 ) written key work of social constructivism is spoken, among other things of " sediments of knowledge and meaning."
Criticism
Although the lexical approach is often used in studies on personality, he is not without criticism.
- Many properties of psychological importance are too complex to map them into individual words in everyday language. Sometimes it takes a comprehensive text in order to grasp a particular trait accurately and reflect.
- There are lexical ambiguities ( homographs ), which are not always used in the right context.
- There are languages that do not allow lexical analysis, because there are no written records.
- Personality descriptive terms change with time and differ in dialects, languages and cultures.