Luppo Kuillman

Moral reasoning explained by personality traits 79 3 Instrument Detailed description Big Five Inventory (BFI) Because of advancing insights regarding personality mea- surement, in our study we opted to use the meta traits ‘Stability’ and ‘Plasticity’ as established by Van der Linden and colleagues (Van der Linden et al. 2010). To obtain the personality traits for construing both meta-traits we admin- istered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) which assess the follow- ing personality traits: a) extraversion; b) agreeableness; c) conscientiousness; d) neuroticism; and e) openness (John et al. 1991). The BFI is a 44-item questionnaire containing short phrases. All 44 items are related to the central state- ment: “I am someone who….” Examples of questions tap- ping the five personality traits are as follows: “Is talkative” (Extraversion), “Has a forgiving nature” (Agreeableness), “Is a reliable worker” (Conscientiousness), “Can be tense” (Neuroticism), and “Likes to reflect, play with ideas” (Open- ness). All items could be answered from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree). The original BFI in English was translated into Dutch and showed good psychometric properties. The five scales of the BFI showed adequate internal consistency, with a mean Cronbach’s alpha of 0.83 (Denissen et al. 2008). In the current study, the alphas ranged between .69 and .87, with a mean of .77. Before constructing and using the meta-traits in our study we reproduced the factor analytical approach of Van der Linden, te Nijenhuis and Bakker (2010). To test whether the personality meta-traits ‘Stability’ and ‘Plasticity’ were present in our data, we employed the fac- tor analytical approach as reported by van der Linden et al. (2010) and used similar criteria for testing for a higher-order factor solution. First, the Eigenvalue was only just 1 (specifi- cally, 1.003) for the second factor, whereas it was more than twice as large for the first factor 2.0. Moreover, van der Lin- den et al. found Eigenvalues 1.007 and 2.3, for the first and second factor, respectively. Second, inspection of the scree plot showed that the only clear drop occurred after the first factor. Third, in the current study, the two components cor- related moderately (r=.33) (Cohen 1988) explaining 11% of the variance. Based on these findings a CFA was allowed to