Six independent factors of personality variation: a response to Saucier

Abstract

We address the concerns raised by Saucier about our proposed six‐factor structure of personality. First, we dispute Saucier's new interpretation of the Negative Valence factor as a meaningful dimension of personality variation. We explain that Negative Valence terms may distort the structure of personality‐descriptive terms, and that the substantive variance of Honesty is weakly correlated with Negative Valence. Also, we point out that our proposed six factors are (like the Big Five) roughly orthogonal, and that the occurrence of rotational variants within this six‐dimensional space is not problematic. We argue that in terms of comprehensiveness, parsimony, independence of factors, and replicability across languages, our proposed six‐factor model so far seems to be the optimal structure of personality characteristics. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.