PlayInfoBox

Home /Education /Allport's Trait Theory: The Three Levels Explained

Allport's Trait Theory: The Three Levels Explained

See how cardinal, central, and secondary traits differ based on how much influence they have over a person.

Cardinal Trait

A single trait so powerful it dominates almost every aspect of a person's life and behavior. Psychologist Gordon Allport, who organized personality traits into three tiers by their scope of influence, considered people with a truly dominant cardinal trait to be extremely rare.

Central Trait

The roughly 5 to 10 core traits most commonly used to describe a person. Words that show up in a recommendation letter or introduction β€” "diligent," "kind," "has a good sense of humor" β€” are typically central traits.

Secondary Trait

A trait that appears only in specific situations, less visible and less consistent than central traits β€” for example, an unusually strong dislike of one particular food, or nervousness that only shows up around strangers.

Personal Disposition

Unlike a "common trait" used to compare everyone on the same scale, a personal disposition is unique to one individual. Allport distinguished between common traits, used to rank multiple people on a shared standard, and personal dispositions, which appear only in an individual's own unique combination β€” and argued that understanding someone's real personality requires looking at personal dispositions rather than ranking them on common traits alone.

What is Allport's trait theory?

American psychologist Gordon Allport defined a trait, in his 1937 book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, as a neuropsychic structure that renders many stimuli functionally equivalent and initiates consistent forms of behavior. He's regarded as one of the early figures who put the study of personality traits on academic footing, and he organized traits into three tiers β€” cardinal, central, and secondary β€” based on how much influence each has on a person's behavior.

How is it viewed in personality psychology today?

Allport's trait theory is seen as a starting point that led to Raymond Cattell's factor-analytic research and, eventually, to the Big Five model used most widely today. That said, the cardinal/central/secondary tier structure itself is more of a conceptual framework Allport proposed than a statistically validated factor structure β€” modern research relies on models like the Big Five, which have been validated against large datasets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does anyone actually have a cardinal trait?

Even Allport believed that people with a trait powerful enough to dominate their entire life, as a true cardinal trait would, are extremely rare. They tend to be illustrated through historical figures' nicknames (someone described as "Machiavellian," for instance) β€” most people are better described by a combination of a few central traits.

How does this relate to the Big Five?

The lexical research that Allport and Odbert conducted β€” combing dictionaries for thousands of personality-describing words β€” is considered an important foundation that later researchers' factor analyses built on, eventually developing into today's Big Five five-factor model.