Jerry S. Wiggins

Who was Jerry S. Wiggins?

Jerry S. Wiggins was an American personality and clinical psychologist known for developing scales to assess the traits in the circumplex model, writing and editing texts on personality theory and psychometrics and for developing measures of interpersonal behavior.

Wiggins was one of the most prominent advocates of circular representations of personality and he formalized the circular model with modern statistical techniques. Wiggins started with the lexical assumption -. But he went further in his effort at taxonomy by arguing that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in which individuals differ. Wiggins was most concerned primarily with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these from other categories of traits.

In 2004, the journal Multivariate Behavioral Research published a special edition entitled ‘Personality Topics in Honor of Jerry S. Wiggins’ which was guest edited by Lewis R Goldberg.