Measuring thinking styles in addition to measuring personality traits?

Abstract

This paper intends to join the long-standing debate regarding thinking styles and personality traits-should thinking styles be measured in addition to the measurement of personality traits? The means to achieve this goal was to provide empirical evidence as well as to review other studies in the literature. The Thinking Styles Inventory and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory were administered to 267 (67 male and 200 female) students from a large research university in Beijing, People's Republic of China. Results showed that thinking styles and personality traits statistically overlap. However, this overlap is limited. Two major arguments are made. First, thinking styles make a unique contribution to the understanding of human individual differences. Second, the necessity for measuring thinking styles apart from measuring personality traits depends on who uses the inventories and for what purposes. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.