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Reply to: Four personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustive

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 1047–1048 (2019)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 16 September 2019

replying to Freudenstein, J. P., Strauch, C., Mussel, P. & Ziegler, M. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0721-4 (2019)

We thank Freudenstein et al.1 for their thoughtful remarks on our study2 and for the opportunity to clarify our published results. We share the authors’ concern about the premature use of the uncovered types in personality assessment, but must emphasize that the empirical findings of the computational analysis reported in our study remain valid. Indeed, Freudenstein et al. “concur that [their] analyses reveal four meaningful types”, highlighting the methods’ “notable improvement to previous approaches”. We supplement the opinion of Freudenstein et al. on the interpretation of our results along four main directions.

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Fig. 1: Unintuitive properties of the five-dimensional space of personality traits.

Data availability

Data are available from https://osf.io/tbmh5/.

Code availability

Code is available in a GitHub repository at https://github.com/amarallab/personality-types.

References

  1. Freudenstein, J.-P., Strauch, C., Mussel, P. & Ziegler, M. Four personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustive. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0721-4 (2019).

  2. Gerlach, M., Farb, B., Revelle, W. & Amaral, L. A. N. A robust data-driven approach identifies four personality types across four large data sets. Nat. Hum. Behav. 2, 735–742 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Revelle, W., Wilt, J. & Condon, D. M. in The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Individual Differences (eds Chamorro-Premuzic, T. et al.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

  4. Revelle, W. & Condon, D. M. in The Wiley Handbook of Psychometric Testing: A Multidisciplinary Reference on Survey, Scale and Test Development (eds Irwing, P., Booth, T, & Hughes, D.J.) ch. 23 (Wiley, 2019).

  5. McCrae, R. R. & Costa, P. T. in The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment Vol. 1 (eds Boyle, G. J. et al.) 273–294 (SAGE, 2008).

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Acknowledgements

L.A.N.A. acknowledges a John and Leslie McQuown Gift to NICO and support from the Department of Defense Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-14-1-0259. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Martin Gerlach & Luís A. Nunes Amaral

  2. Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    William Revelle

  3. Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Luís A. Nunes Amaral

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Luís A. Nunes Amaral

  5. Department of Medicine, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Luís A. Nunes Amaral

Authors
  1. Martin Gerlach
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  2. William Revelle
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  3. Luís A. Nunes Amaral
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Contributions

M.G., W.R. and L.A.N.A. designed research; M.G., W.R. and L.A.N.A. performed research; M.G. analysed data; M.G., W.R. and L.A.N.A. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luís A. Nunes Amaral.

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Gerlach, M., Revelle, W. & Amaral, L.A.N. Reply to: Four personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustive. Nat Hum Behav 3, 1047–1048 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0722-3

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