Revisiting the stability of variability: Traitedness and supertraitedness on the ACL and Neo-FFI

The concept of traitedness asserts that some people are so consistent/variable with regard to relevant trait behavior that they should be considered traited/untraited on a given factor. In the present study we assessed the stability of traitedness, operationalized via the intra-individual standard deviations for each of the Big Five factors, over time using 2 different instru-ments. Self-descriptions of male and female university students on the Adjective Checklist (ACL) and NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) demonstrated: (1) reliable individual differences in the stability of traitedness on each of the 5 factors over time; (2) positive corre-lations among the 5 standard deviations at a given testing, suggesting that some persons are generally less/more variable than others; and (3) an absence of convergent validity between the traitedness measures for the 2 instruments, suggesting that the 2 instruments were assessing different types of consistency.