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/varia ble with regard to relevant trait behavior that they should be considered " traited"/"untraited" on a given factor. The present studies assessed the st ability of traitedness, operationalized via the intra-individual standard d eviations for each of the Big Five factors. over time using two different i nstruments. Self-descriptions of male and female university students on the Adjective Checklist (ACL) and NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) demonstr ated: (1) reliable individual differences in the stability of traitedness o n each of the five factors over time; (2) positive correlations among the f ive standard deviations at a given testing, suggesting that some persons ar e generally less/more variable than others; and (3) an absence of convergen t validity between the traitedness measures for the two instruments, sugges ting that the two instruments were assessing different types of consistency .