| Abstract: | Attempts to account for most important differences in personality by applying factor analysis to long lists of personality trait variables led to extraction of 5 or 6 orthogonal factorial dimensions. The present paper addresses an issue of more parsimonious three-dimensional visualization of a set of 6 factorial dimensions. Russian speaking respondents used the lists of 496 and 296 personality-relevant nouns for judging 1242 and 447 peoples, respectively. To visualize 6 factorial dimensions of the personality traits structure, a three-dimensional rugby (ball) cake model was suggested and examined by comparison of model-predicted and observed patterns of correlation of each noun with 6 factorial scales. Each noun was linked to one of 43 narrow personality traits predicted by the rugby cake shape. A shorter list of nouns was selected for exemplifying each pole of these traits and all these nouns were evenly written on the surface of the rugby cake shape. Topological features of such three-dimensional shape provided an explanation of failure to reduce 5–6 factorial dimensions to just three spatial dimensions by means of a pure empirical analysis of either loadings of trait variables on these dimensions or their correlations with them. |
