Lewis R. Goldberg is an American personality psychologist and a professor emeritus at the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

. 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 the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that are formed from biological and environmental factors, and which change over time. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, m ...

. 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 ...

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

Education

Lew Goldberg was born in Chicago, Illinois, 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 Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

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

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

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. Since 1960 he has taught at the

, where he is professor emeritus. He is a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute, 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 and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F ...

. In 1966 he became a Fulbright 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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. In 1974 he was a Fulbright professor again, at Istanbul University 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 charged with conducting criminal investigations and protecting U.S. political leaders, their families, and ...

. 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 instit ...

from 1981 to 1982. Goldberg has published more than 100 research articles. He has also earned three lifetime achievement awards: the

Jack Block Jacob "Jack" Block (April 28, 1924 – January 13, 2010) was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. His main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal resear ...

Award for outstanding contributions to personality research from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) (2006), the Saul Sells Award for outstanding contributions to multivariate research from the

Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology The Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) is a small academic organization of research psychologists who have interests in multivariate statistical models for advancing psychological knowledge. It publishes a journal, '' Multivari ...

(SMEP) (2006), and most recently the Bruno Klopfer 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 space. 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 state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. 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 prima ...

and on the Graduate Record Examination Board Research Committee. Goldberg has previously served as the president of both the

(1974-1975) and the Association for Research in Personality (2004-2006). He is a fellow of the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

References

External links

Goldberg's homepageIPIP website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldberg, Lewis 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 Fulbright alumni