Research Interests
My current research centers on several basic questions regarding dispositional individual differences.
What is the best model for the structure of personality attributes? I seek to find both very broad and relatively more specific factors in personality descriptions, and the optimal representation for their hierarchical relations. Many of my studies employ a lexical approach, concentrating on those attributes so significant as to become encoded in language.
What is the best model for the structure of worldview-beliefs (social attitudes)? This line of work begain with a lexical approach to classifying interindividual variation in social attitudes, to find basic factors in this domain. Later and in-progress work has expanded the classification to include numerous other variables.
What is the best model for the structure of dispositional individual differences, in general? I am interested also in the relations between personality domain and other domains, including not only worldview-beliefs, but also interests (and aversions), motivational tendencies, and tendencies toward the more common clinical Axis I and Axis II disorders. An aim is expansion of the "personality taxonomy" into a wider taxonomy of all important dispositional individual differences. I am interested, moreoer, in theories that account for the structures in either domain, including those that emphasize biological processes.