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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Res Pers. 2014 Nov 11;56:82–92. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.10.009

Table 1.

Five Main Assertions of Whole Trait Theory.

  1. The descriptive side of traits is best thought of as density distributions of states.

  2. It is important to provide an explanatory account of the Big 5.

  3. Adding an explanatory account to the Big 5 creates two parts to traits, an explanatory part and a descriptive part, and these two parts are distinct entities that nevertheless can be joined into whole traits because one of the parts is the causal consequence of the other part.

  4. The explanatory part of traits consists of social-cognitive mechanisms.

  5. What needs to be done next is to identify social-cognitive mechanisms that produce Big-5 states.