Five studies investigated personality trait structures as cognitive schemas. Norman's (1963) ”Big Five” trait dimensions were hypothesized to function as schemas to organize the lexicon of subordinate traits. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that subjects employ an implicit theory of personality similar to the ”Big Five” structure in making judgments about trait co-occurrence and semantic similarity. Experiments 3 and 4, however, failed to show clustering by trait category in a tree-recall paradigm, regardless of whether the memory task was framed in a social context or not. Experiment 5 demonstrated considerable overlap in meaning in the subordinate traits in the Norman list, suggesting that the results in Experiments 3 and 4 may reflect a lack of distinctiveness in the trait-factor relationships. The knowledge stuctures comprising implicit personality theory are not automatically activated by schema-relevant stimulus information.
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Smith et al. (1987) studied this question.