The general factor of personality: Substance or artefact?

• Six major critiques of the GFP are reviewed.
• The major focus is the social desirability hypothesis.
• We consider factor saturation, blended variable models, genetic dominance, and correlation with g.
• In addition we delineate problems with current MTMM models.
• We present evidence and argument which show reasonable doubt with respect to each critique.

While it is now widely recognized that a general factor (GFP) can be extracted from most personality data, this finding has been subject to numerous critiques: (1) that the GFP is an artefact due to socially desirable responding; (2) that it is factorially indeterminate; (3) that it can be more parsimoniously modelled using blended variables; (4) that it shows less genetic variance due to dominance than should be true of a fitness trait; (5) that it correlates more weakly with g than would be predicted from Life History theory; (6) that it cannot be recovered across personality inventories. We present new evidence and argument to show that each of these critiques is open to reasonable doubt.