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Description: We applied Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to select personality-descriptive adjectives with minimal inter-item correlations. When used to predict the frequency of everyday life behaviors, this ‘crude-grit’ set outperformed a traditional big-five item set and sets of randomly selected adjectives. The size of the predictive advantage of the crude-grit set was generally higher for those behaviors that could also be predicted better by the big-five item set. This study provides a proof-of-concept for an alternative procedure for compiling personality scales, and serves as a starting point for future studies using broader item sets.