Cattell's Personality Analysis

Cattell was well known for his systematic approach to both defining and measuring various aspects of personality. One of his major contributions in studying personality was the Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), which provide descriptions of the primary personality factor. He later turned this into the five second-order factors of personality. Factor analysis was another contribution, which utilized correlation to measure relationships between two sets of numbers, with zero being no correlation and both positive and negative one showing strong correlation (Cloninger, 2013). In understanding of how heredity influences personality, however, his biggest contribution was simply his systematic approach for measuring the origins
In order to measure how much heredity influence personality, he developed the MAVA to distinguishes between constitutional traits and environmental-mold traits (Cloninger, 2013). Basically, the MAVA assesses how much of a given trait is the result of hereditary and how much comes from environmental factors, such as learning. The way that the MAVA works is that it uses statistical analysis to compare both factors against those found in family members to identify any similarities. Cattell also evaluated family members on a number of different elements, including relatives that were raised together and relatives raised apart, in addition to observing the specific relationships within the family, such as siblings, twins, and members of the family that were adopted (Cloninger, 2013). Through his research, Cattell found that relatives had more similarities in personality traits than nonrelatives do. More importantly, he verified that many traits had high heritability, including those linked with personality. This finding was significant to the understanding of personality development. According to Cloninger (2013), “Cattell (1973) estimated the heritability (H) of various traits, which he defined as ‘the fraction of the total measured variance of the trait X in the population that is due to heredity differences in individual makeup” (p. 155). For instance, he found that heredity had the greatest influence of intelligence, while radicalism-conservatism was influenced the least (Cloninger, 2013). Ultimately, Cattell’s findings on the heritability of traits was significant to the understanding of personality psychology because it provides an explanation about how personality likely develops, while discovering how much of personality is related to nature (heredity) and how much is related to nurture