Traits as constructs

Traits, we must note from the outset, are not per se observables. Nor are they real entities. You will never be able to place them under a microscope. They are descriptive schemas that are the product of human reason and imagination. They serve a heuristic purpose, as do all other constructs about the world in which we live: namely, they give a conceptual order to our world and make it more comprehensible than it would be without them. That Allport ([1937] 1961), for example, stipulates that traits – or personality for that matter – have neuropsychic referents does not turn them into things (reify them so to speak). Freud, for example, spoke of the Oedipal complex, “penis envy,” and numerous other “dynamic” elements of the human psyche, affirming all the while that these descriptors of human psychical states and behavior could be mapped in principle to brain structures. Clearly, conceptualizing a psychical entity or a “complex,” and then establishing a semantic explanatory link to a neurologic substrate, does not make the entity real or any less a hypothetical construct.