The General Factor of Personality and its relation to Self-Esteem in 628,640 Internet respondents

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the General Factor of Personality (GFP) and Self-Esteem. We found a GFP that explained 57% of the reliable variance in a model that went from the Big Five to the Big Two to the Big One in a secondary analysis of a sample of 628,640 participants, reported by Erdle, Gosling, and Potter (2009) using an interactive website on the Internet. The GFP in turn accounted for 67% of the variance in the measure of Self-Esteem. We discuss alternative possibilities to account for the relationship.