The general factor of personality: A general critique

•Many have claimed there exists a general factor of personality.•We show this is a mistaken understanding of basic psychometrics.•We give a brief tutorial how to find a general factor.•We compare supposed GFPs to those found in the cognitive domain.

Recently, it has been proposed that all non-cognitive measures of personality share a general factor of personality. A problem with many of these studies is a lack of clarity in defining a general factor. In this paper we address the multiple ways in which a general factor has been identified and argue that many of these approaches find factors that are not in fact general. Through the use of artificial examples, we show that a general factor is not:1.The first factor or component of a correlation or covariance matrix.2.The first factor resulting from a bifactor rotation or biquartimin transformation.3.Necessarily the result of a confirmatory factor analysis forcing a bifactor solution.We consider how the definition of what constitutes a general factor can lead to confusion, and we will demonstrate alternative ways of estimating the general factor saturation that are more appropriate.