Don’t pull any old dictionary from the shelf: The performance of off-the-shelf and population derived lexica in extracting implicit personality from self-descriptions

Substantial efforts have been made to develop comprehensive dictionaries of personality traits in many languages. Nevertheless, given that what is important and salient in individuals’ lived experience might be changing over time, this raises the question about the long-term usefulness of ‘off-the-shelf’ dictionaries developed decades ago. In the current study we used a bottom-up approach to create a large population-specific lexicon of personality terms. We subsequently examined the overlap and sensitivity to extract implicit personality of this dictionary compared to an established trait dictionary in the same language. Overall, we found that the two dictionaries only showed limited overlap with a pronounced divergence in emotionality (Neuroticism) and social aspects (Agreeableness) of personality. In addition to this, we found that while the implicit personality extracted from self-descriptions using the established dictionary showed alignment with participants self-rated personality, especially in Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, the population-specific dictionary showed a significantly greater alignment between implicit and self-rated personality. In summary, our current study highlights the need to extend our thinking about the psycholexical hypothesis, moving away from assumptions of time invariant language encoding to more explicitly recognizing the temporal dynamics underpinning the expression and use of personality trait terms.