personality trait

Meaning: A personality trait is a relatively stable disposition to think, feel, and act in a particular way across many situations and over time. Trait theories describe people by their position along dimensions, not by sorting them into types. The best-known model is the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Eysenck's PEN model uses three dimensions: psychoticism, extraversion-introversion, and neuroticism (emotional stability vs. instability). Twin and adoption studies suggest traits are partly heritable.

On the MCAT: Expect a vignette describing behavior that you match to a Big Five dimension, or a study correlating a trait with an outcome, such as conscientiousness with job performance. Questions contrast the trait view with others: the social-cognitive perspective stresses person–situation interaction, the biological perspective stresses genes and temperament, and the psychoanalytic and humanistic perspectives stress unconscious conflict or self-actualization. Traits are typically measured with self-report questionnaires.

Common confusion: A trait is not a state. A state is temporary, like feeling anxious before an exam, whereas a trait is an enduring tendency, like high neuroticism. Traits are continuous dimensions, not either/or categories, and they predict behavior averaged across situations better than any single act, so situational factors still matter.