Big five personality traits

In psychology, the big five personality traits are an approach to personality theory. The big five personality traits are as follows:

• Neuroticism: a tendency to easily experience unpleasant emotions
• Extraversion: a tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others
• Agreeableness: a tendency to be compassionate rather than antagonistic towards others
• Conscientiousness: a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement
• Openness to experience: a tendency to enjoy art, new intellectual experiences, and ideas

Origin

The five personality traits are based on major clusters of personality traits identified by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1987. They identified these traits using factor analysis over a list of 35 traits identified by Raymond Cattell, eliminating any traits that correlate directly with one another. Cattell had obtained his list of traits by factor analysis of 4500 personality-describing adjectives identified in the Lexical Hypothesis of Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert.

Scientific findings

Ever since the 1990s when the consensus of psychologists gradually came to support a five-factor model of personality, there has been a growing body of research surrounding these personality traits. The existence of each one has been verified by cross-cultural research demonstrating that they exist in individuals outside of Western nations, and all show an influence from both heredity and environment (in roughly equal proportion).

A person's ratings on the five factors has been found to change with time, with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness increasing, while Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness generally decrease as a person ages.

Sexes show differences in Big Five scores across cultures, with women scoring higher in both the Agreeableness and Neuroticism domains. (The mere fact that sex differences have been found does not by itself demonstrate that the sexes are innately different in personality, although that is a possibility.)

Individuals also differ when viewed by the order of their births; Frank J. Sulloway has mounted evidence that birth order is correlated with personality traits: firstsborns are statistically more conscientious, more socially dominant, less agreeable, and less open to new ideas compared to laterborns.

Recent work has also found relationships between Geert Hofstede's cultural factors, Individualism, Power Distance, Masculinity, and Uncertainty Avoidance, with the average Big Five scores in a country. For instance, the degree to which a country values individualism correlates with its average Extroversion, while people living in cultures which are accepting of large inequalities in their power structures tend to score somewhat higher on Openness. The reasons for these differences are as yet unknown; this is an active area of research.

Weaknesses of the Five Factor Model

There are several weaknesses to the Big Five. The first of these is that the five factors are not fully "orthogonal" to one another; that is, the five factors are not independent. Negative correlations often appear between Neuroticism and Extroversion, for instance, indicating that those who are more prone to experiencing negative emotions tend to be less talkative and outgoing.

Another weakness is that the Big Five do not explain all of human personality. Some psychologists have dissented from the model precisely because they feel it neglects other personality traits, such as:

• Religiousness
• Manipulativeness
• Honesty
• Sexiness
• Thriftiness
• Conservativeness
• Masculinity/Femininity
• Snobbishness
• Sense of humor

Correlations have been found between these factors and the Big Five, such as the well known inverse relationship between political conservatism and Openness, although variation in these traits is not entirely explained by the Five Factors themselves.

Another weakness of the Big Five is that they rely on self report questionnaires to be measured; self report bias and falsification of responses is impossible to deal with completely. This becomes especially important when considering why scores may differ between individuals or groups of people – differences in scores may represent genuine underlying personality differences, or they may simply be an artifact of the way the subjects answered the questions.

The last weakness of the Five Factor Model, and a criticism which has frequently been leveled at it, is that it is not based on any underlying theory; it is merely an empirical finding that certain descriptors cluster together under factor analysis. While this does not mean that these five factors don't exist, the underlying causes behind them are unknown. There is no theoretical justification for why sensation seeking and gregariousness are predictive of general Extroversion, for instance; this is an area for future research to investigate.

See also

• Trait theory
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

External links

• Five-Factor Model from Great Ideas in Personality
• Psychometrics A layman's overview of the field of psychometrics.
• History of the Big 5 from Kuro5hin
• The Personality Project Good source of references for futher reading.