Why not measure that trait? Alternative criteria for identifying important dispositions.

Identifying important dispositional concepts from among a potential array of thousands remains a crucial theoretical task for personality psychology. This analysis examines previous approaches to the reduction process (e.g., lexical, statistical) and suggests an alternative set of criteria based on the act frequency approach to personality. These alternative criteria include reference to the domains of acts encompassed by dispositional constructs, the uniqueness or nonredundancy of those domains, agreement about act-disposition linkages, agreement about within-category prototypicality status, degree of temporal stability, and magnitude of manifested performance base rate. It is argued that previous, more stringent, exclusion criteria have tended to remove from consideration important classes of acts about which the field is centrally concerned. Five empirical studies illustrate the application of these new criteria to a previously neglected dispositional construct: calculating. Discussion focuses on the implications of a more expansive view of the taxonomic task that faces personality psychology. One of the most fundamental theoretical tasks in personality psychology is to identify a subset of important dispositions from among the array of thousands available or imaginable for special conceptual and empirical attention