nCloninger’s Tridimensional Personality

the re tive s tw on pp e sc r, th ing M rmay for me hton, B shton splays ation, a the tendency of individuals to mark questionnaire items in a gen-erally more or less favorable direction (Edwards, 1957). Such dif-ferences might reflect differences in self-esteem, one’s own view of oneself, or in impression management, the desire to make a favorable impression on others (Uziel, 2010). Especially in the con-text of rating others, this is often referred to as a ‘‘halo effect’’, a that both psychological substance and psychometric artifact are in-volved, and that the scale intercorrelations are not, at the one ex-treme, solely a function of social desirability, nor, at the other, the consequence of a single substantive causal factor. The present study will not focus on measures of the Big Five traits, and it will employ only a limited strategy—namely, a behav-ior-genetic analysis based on self-report data from two question-naires. Thus it will not resolve all the questions arising in the Big Five studies. Nevertheless, it can address some of the issues raised by Rushton’s hypothesis that a general factor of personality exists, and exists for evolutionary reasons