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.