A psycholexical Study of Virtues in the Dutch Language,and Relations between Virtues and Personality

Abstract

Following the psycholexical approach, a list of 153 virtue descriptors was selected from a previously constructed list of trait–terms, under the assumption that virtues form a subset of traits. The virtue list was administered to 400 participants (self– and other–raters), who had to indicate the extent to which each term applied to them or to the others. Principal Component Analyses were performed yielding six factors of virtues. In addition, Big Five factors and markers of an external set of virtues were constructed. Correlation and regression analyses were performed to describe the relations between virtues, the Dutch Big Five system and other virtue systems. Compared to the other virtue systems, the present study revealed some additional domains. The overlap found with personality measures corresponds to earlier findings supporting the assumption that virtues are important traits. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords

lexical studies virtues structure

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