PhD defence P. (Peiqian) Wu

Dissertation in short:

The present dissertation addressed two core questions centered around the General Factor of Personality (GFP), namely what is the nature of the GFP (is it a substantive or an artifact factor), and what the GFP means? As the scientific literature suggested, the GFP as the commonly shared variances among personality traits/dimensions (Musek (2007), indicates general social effectiveness (van der Linden et al., 2016; van der Linden et al., 2021). The GFP forms a way to understand humans’ personalities from the perspective of evolutionary psychology (Figueredo et al., 2004; J. Philippe Rushton et al., 2009). To enrich knowledge about the GFP, this thesis addressed the following questions: 1) whether the GFP can be found in non-WEIRD samples; 2) whether found correlations between the GFP and leadership effectiveness from WEIRD samples can be replicated in non-WEIRD samples; 3) whether the GFP can be used to predict leadership emergence; 4) whether the GFP correlates with creativity? In this last chapter, we will summarize the main findings and the relevance of those findings to the literature. Subsequently, the limitations will be discussed. Finally, the remaining topics and possible future directions in the study field will be elaborated on.