No support for a general factor of personality in a reanalysis of Van der Linden et al. (2010)

Reanalysis of data (N = 512) of Van der Linden, Scholte, Cillessen, Te Nijenhuis, and Segers (2010) does not provide support for the existence of a General Factor of Personality (GFP) and of its relation with likeability and popularity among adolescent classmates. First of all, it was impossible to fit a GFP model to the personality data without setting the error variance associated with Extraversion to zero and thus aligning it exclusively with Extraversion. Second, in the full model, which included likeability and popularity, a model without GFP showed a better fit than the Van der Linden et al. (2010) GFP model. Third, when entered together with Extraversion, the GFP did not add any additional variance in likeability and even acted as an suppressor variable of the relation between Extraversion and popularity.