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Trait taxonomies such as the Big Five have been effective in studying population-level trends but may obscure important individual differences in the structure, stability, and personal relevance of individuals’ dispositional tendencies. Inspired by Gordon Allport’s notion that people may be defined by distinctive “organizing foci” of personality, the current work introduces the central trait approach, which focuses on identifying the most defining aspects of an individual and understanding their unique manifestation in a person’s life. To develop this framework, we examine open-ended descriptions of participants’ central personality traits across four data sets (n = 1,488). We assess coverage of trait content by traditional trait taxonomies and then explore what makes a trait self-defining by predicting trait content from informational (e.g., extremity and stability of trait standing) and motivational (e.g., desirability of the trait) factors and qualitatively analyze extended descriptions of these traits for various identity themes. We find that most (but not all) traits fit the Big Five and that those that did mostly reflected participants’ most extreme (but desirable) attributes. This work furthers our understanding of how aspects of personality become personally relevant and lays groundwork for future idiographic study of traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
