Answer:
Later, statistical methods were used to reduce these words to a list of 16 personality traits.
Explanation:
Let's start at the very beginning, when scientist Sir Francis Galton thought that it would be possible to analyze people by language, which became known as the lexical hypothesis. A few years later, Gordon Allport and H. S. Odbert expanded on this theory by searching in a dictionary no less than 17,954 words describing personality-related traits, and then narrowing this immense list to 4,500 adjectives that they said were observable and relatively permanent.
Twenty years later, Raymond Cattell obtained this list prepared by Allport and Odbert and eliminated all synonyms, reaching a total of 171 adjectives. He then asked participants in his research to analyze people they knew based on these characteristics, and with the results it was possible to create 35 personality groups.
Then decided to add 10 more groups, from a review of the psychiatric literature. With the 45 groups in hand, Cattel used a factor analysis system and delimited the 16 major personality factors, which became known as the 16PF Personality Questionnaire.
