Disintegration: A reconceptualization of psychosis proneness as a personality trait separate from the Big Five

•Psychosis proneness is articulated as a basic personality trait, named Disintegration.•Disintegration trait is as broad as other domain traits of the Big Five model.•Disintegration is normally distributed in the general population.•Disintegration is separate from Big Five traits.

A nine-facet hierarchical taxonomy of “Disintegration”, a trait-like disposition that causes variations in psychotic-like behavior, is proposed, along with the scales to assess it. Strong correlations were demonstrated in students (n = 466) between lower-level dimensions, independent of the assessment method. Disintegration lay beyond the Five-Factor Model (FFM) space. This finding was replicated across informant types (self, mother, and father), samples (students and a national representative sample, n = 1001), and units of analyses (facets and items). The most frequent approach to preserve the FFM taxonomy of both normal and non-normal personality variants - mapping psychotic-like phenomena onto the Openness domain - found little support in our data. Disintegration was normally distributed in the general population.