Lewis R. Goldberg (born January 28, 1932) is an American personality

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...

and a professor emeritus at the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a Public university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...

. He is closely associated Goldberg, L.R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. ''American Psychologist, 48'', 26-34. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.48.1.26 with the lexical hypothesis that any culturally important personality characteristic will be represented in the language of that culture. This hypothesis led to a five factor structure of personality trait adjectives (which he dubbed the Big 5).Lewis R. Goldberg (1990) An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 6, 1216-1229 https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216Revelle, W. (2008), Biography of Lewis R. Goldberg. In Encyclopedia of Counseling (F.T.L. Leong et al, editors) Sage. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963978.n198 When applied to personality items this structure is also known as the five-factor model (FFM) of

personality Personality is any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life. These interrelated patterns are relatively stable, but can change over long time per ...

. He is the creator of the

International Personality Item Pool The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) is a public domain collection of items for use in personality tests. It is managed by the Oregon Research Institute. The pool contains 3,329 items. These items make up more than 250 inventories that m ...

https://ipip.ori.org/(IPIP), a website that provides public-domain personality measures.

Education

Lew Goldberg was born in

Chicago, Illinois Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, on January 28, 1932. His early education took place at the Bret Harte elementary school in Chicago, and the Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois. In 1953 Goldberg received an A.B. in social relations from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. He earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

in 1958 where his Ph.D. advisor was E. Lowell Kelly; Kelly provided Goldberg with training in the methodology of quantitative personality assessment.

Academic career

As an advanced graduate student at Michigan, Goldberg met Warren T. Norman, a new assistant professor, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator on issues in personality structure and assessment. Their initial work together on the generality of the Big 5, and their subsequent work on the lexical hypothesis has had a major impact upon the development of a consensual model of personality. After receiving his doctorate, Goldberg became a visiting assistant professor at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. Since 1960 he has taught at the

, where he is professor emeritus. He is a senior scientist at the

Oregon Research Institute The Oregon Research Institute is an American psychology research institute in Eugene, Oregon Eugene ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lane County, Oregon, United States. It is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, near the ...

, where he has carried out research since 1961. From 1962 to 1966, Goldberg served as a field selection officer for the United States

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an Independent agency of the U.S. government, independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to communities in partner countries around the world. It was established in Marc ...

. In 1966 he became a

Fulbright The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States cultural exchange programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people ...

professor at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In 1970 he spent a year as a visiting professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. In 1974 he was a Fulbright professor again, at

Istanbul University Istanbul University, also known as University of Istanbul (), is a Public university, public research university located in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded by Mehmed II on May 30, 1453, a day after Fall of Constantinople, the conquest of Constantinop ...

in Turkey. From 1980 to 1986 he served as a consultant in the Intelligence Division of the

United States Secret Service The United States Secret Service (USSS or Secret Service) is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security tasked with conducting criminal investigations and providing protection to American political leaders, thei ...

. He was a fellow at the

Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, is an independent research institute in the field of the humanities and social and behavioural sciences founded in 1970. The insti ...

from 1981 to 1982. Goldberg has published more than 100 research articles. He has also earned three lifetime achievement awards: the Jack Block Award for outstanding contributions to personality research from the

Society for Personality and Social Psychology A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. So ...

(SPSP) (2006), the Saul Sells Award for outstanding contributions to multivariate research from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) (2006), and most recently the

Bruno Klopfer Bruno Klopfer (1 October 1900 – 23 October 1971) was a German psychologist, born in Bavaria. He had a profound impact on the development of psychological personality testing, and was an important pioneer and innovator in the development, scoring ...

Award for outstanding contributions to personality assessment from the Society for Personality Assessment (SPA) (2009).

Personality structure and measurement

Throughout his career, Goldberg has made substantial contributions to the measurement of personality. His early work examined the multidimensional structure of adjectival descriptors sampled from prior lexical work of Norman. This was an important contribution suggesting that the "Big Five" factors of peer ratings could be identified in adjectives representing a sample of the lexicon. Subsequent work on the lexical hypothesis, in collaboration with two prominent Dutch scholars, suggested that the structure could be seen as a set of circumplexes embedded in five dimensional spaces. Goldberg also did a study on act-frequency signatures of the “Big Five” and how much in our incidental or everyday behavior that we show signature behavior pertaining to the “Big Five.” These five aspects showed up numerous times during the reported study and this shows that we exhibit behavioral signatures of the “Big Five,” those being extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect. This is important as Goldberg's research may help enrich our understanding of our everyday mundane actions and how our personality affects it. More recently, Goldberg and his colleagues have released the International Personality Item Pool which is an international "Collaboratory" which contains more than 3,000 short item stems summarizing the content of many personality inventories. At least 250 separate scales have been developed from the IPIP items, and at least some of the items have been translated into more than 35 languages. Validity data for these scales comes from a longitudinal sample of approximately 800 community volunteers in the cities of Eugene and Springfield in

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

. These participants have taken the IPIP items as well as proprietary instruments measuring temperamental traits, occupational interests, and various activities. Goldberg, in his typically open spirit of collaborative science, provides the data from the Eugene-Springfield sample to interested researchers. With his colleague Sarah Hampson, Goldberg has initiated a 40-year follow up to a study started by John Digman at the University of Hawaii.Hampson, Sarah E.; Goldberg, Lewis R. (2006), A first large cohort study of personality trait stability over the 40 years between elementary school and midlife. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 9, 763-779. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.763 This study is examining the health outcomes in middle adulthood associated with personality rating in middle school.

Boards and committees

Goldberg has served on the Personality and Cognition Research Review Committee and the Cognition, Emotion, and Personality Research Review Committee of the

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primar ...

and on the

Graduate Record Examination The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardized test that is part of the admissions process for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada and a few other countries. The GRE is owned and administered by Educational Testing ...

Board Research Committee. Goldberg has previously served as the president of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (1974-1975) the

Association for Research in Personality The Association for Research in Personality (abbreviated ARP) is an American learned society dedicated to advancing research into personality. Its mission statement does not mention specific disciplines such as social psychology or policy research, ...

(2004-2006) and The World Association for Personality Psychology (2019-2024). He is a fellow of the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 170,000 members, including scientists, educators, clin ...

, the

Association for Psychological Science The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in r ...

, and the

References

External links

IPIP website
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldberg, Lewis 21st-century American psychologists Harvard College alumni University of Michigan alumni University of Oregon faculty Personality trait theorists Living people 20th-century American Jews 1932 births 21st-century American Jews Quantitative psychologists 20th-century American psychologists Presidents of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology