Agreeableness
Agreeableness is a personality trait referring to individuals that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm, honest, and considerate.
The lower-level traits, or facets that are grouped under agreeableness are: trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness.
[6] As is the case with all Big Five personality traits, the roots of the modern concept of agreeableness can be traced to a 1936 study by Gordon Allport and Henry S.
[7] Seven years after that study, Raymond Cattell published a cluster analysis of the thousands of personality-related words identified by Allport and Odbert.
[10] Although labelled "independence" by Cattell, one of the global factors identified by the 16PF Questionnaire was an early precursor to the modern concept of agreeableness.
Lexical measures use individual adjectives that reflect agreeableness or disagreeableness traits, such as sympathetic, cooperative, warm, considerate, harsh, unkind, rude.
Thompson (2008)[2] revised these markers to develop a 40-word measure with better psychometric properties in both American and non-American populations: the International English Mini-Markers.
This brief measure has good internal consistency reliabilities[jargon] and other validity for assessing agreeableness and other five factor personality dimensions, both within and, especially, without American populations.
[12] Cattell's factor analytic approach, which aimed to identify universal personality structures[clarification needed], inspired many studies in the decades following the introduction of the 16PF.
[11] One of these, agreeableness, was defined by a number of personality-related words similar to those present in earlier and more recent manifestations of the construct; examples include "friendly", "good-natured", "cooperative", "trustful", "nurturing", "sociable", and "considerate".
[16][17] Beginning in the 1970s, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae began researching the development of personality assessments based on factor models.
These three factors were neuroticism (vs. emotional stability), extraversion (vs. introversion), and openness (vs. closedness) to experience, resulting in the acronym "NEO.
"[18] Due to similarities between their three-factor NEO Personality Inventory and Goldberg's Big Five, Costa and McCrae began to develop scales to assess agreeableness and conscientiousness in the early 1980s.
Known as facets, the lower-level traits subsumed by agreeableness were first introduced with the 1992 publication of the revised version of the NEO PI.
Based on the modern NEO PI-R, the six facets of agreeableness are: trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness.
[21] Altruism is similar to Alfred Adler's concept of social interest, which is a tendency to direct one's actions toward the betterment of society.
[24] Individuals who score low on altruism tend to be discourteous, selfish, or greedy, a pattern of behaviors known as "self-interest" in Adlerian psychology.
Those who score high on compliance tend to be meek and mild, and to prefer cooperation or deference as a means of resolving conflict.
[36] To help capture the numerous distinctions between the Big Five and HEXACO models, Ashton and Lee propose four new facet labels in their conceptualization of agreeableness: forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility, and patience.
[40] Research also shows that people high in agreeableness are more likely to control negative emotions like anger in conflict situations.
Researchers have found that low levels of agreeableness are associated with hostile thoughts and aggression in adolescents, as well as poor social adjustment.
However, large-scale meta-analyses have revealed that the aspects of agreeableness (i.e., compassion and politeness) have meaningful and opposite relations with cognitive abilities.
[49] Agreeableness is important to psychological well-being, predicting mental health, positive affect, and good relations with others.
[52] A study done by Caspi, Elder, and Bem (1987) found that explosive and ill-tempered children had higher rates of divorce as adults when compared with their even-tempered peers.
[53] A second and more recent study by Shiner (2000) found that composite variables describing middle-childhood agreeableness and friendly compliance predicted adolescent academic performance, behavioral conduct, and social competence ten years later.
