Big5

Introduction To The Big 5 Personality Model

The Big Five are five factors or dimensions that measure personality traits. Each dimension is made up of a number of factors that provide a more in depth understanding of each of the Big 5 overall factors. Average scores are in the middle and scores are distributed across a normalized bell curve. So, a person that scores 50 on a particular facet would be average in terms of the overall population whereas one who scores 90% is in the top 10% of the population with respect to demonstrating that personality dimension.

Extraversion - This factor describes the degree to which an individual is introverted or extraverted which relates to what gives a person energy (alone time or in groups interacting). The factors making up extraversion include: Activity level, Assertiveness, Cheerfulness, Excitement-seeking, Outgoing and Gregariousness Agreeableness - This factor Includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate. Conscientiousness. Includes traits like organized, thorough, and planful. Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability). Includes traits like tense, moody, and anxious. Openness - This factor describes how open or closed your thinking is. Highly open people are intellectually curious, appreciate the arts, emotion, imagination and new experiences. People who are less open tend towards tradition, familiarity and do not like as much change in their lives.

to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination). Includes traits like having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

As you can see, each of the Big Five factors is quite broad and consists of a range of more specific traits. The Big Five structure was derived from statistical analyses of which traits tend to co-occur in people's descriptions of themselves or other people. The underlying correlations are probabilistic, and exceptions are possible. For example, talkativeness and assertiveness are both traits associated with Extraversion, but they do not go together by logical necessity: you could imagine somebody that is assertive but not talkative (the "strong, silent type"). However, many studies indicate that people who are talkative are usually also assertive (and vice versa), which is why they go together under the broader Extraversion factor.

For this reason, you should be clear about your research goals when choosing your measures. If you expect that you might need to make finer distinctions (such as between talkativeness and assertiveness), a broad-level Big Five instrument will not be enough. You could use one of the longer inventories that make facet-level distinctions (like the NEO PI-R or the IPIP scales - see below), or you could supplement a shorter inventory (like the Big Five Inventory) with additional scales that measure the specific dimensions that you are interested in.

It is also worth noting that there are many aspects of personality that are not subsumed within the Big Five. The term personality trait has a special meaning in personality psychology that is narrower than the everyday usage of the term. Motivations, emotions, attitudes, abilities, self-concepts, social roles, autobiographical memories, and life stories are just a few of the other "units" that personality psychologists study. Some of these other units may have theoretical or empirical relationships with the Big Five traits, but they are conceptually distinct. For this reason, even a very comprehensive profile of somebody's personality traits can only be considered a partial description of their personality.

Is the Big Five a theory? What is the difference between the terms Big Five, Five-Factor Model, and Five-Factor Theory?

The Big Five are, collectively, a taxonomy of personality trait: a coordinate system that maps which traits go together in people's descriptions or ratings of one another. The Big Five are an empirically based phenomenon, not a theory of personality. The Big Five factors were discovered through a statistical procedure called factor analysis, which was used to analyze how ratings of various personality traits are correlated in humans. The original derivations relied heavily on American and Western European samples, and researchers are still examining the extent to which the Big Five structure generalizes across cultures.

Some researchers use the label Five-Factor Model instead of "Big Five." In scientific usage, the word "model" can refer either to a descriptive framework of what has been observed, or to a theoretical explanation of causes and consequences. The Five-Factor Model (i.e., Big Five) is a model in the descriptive sense only. The term "Big Five" was coined by Lew Goldberg and was originally associated with studies of personality traits used in natural language. The term "Five-Factor Model" has been more commonly associated with studies of traits using personality questionnaires. The two research traditions yielded largely consonant models (in fact, this is one of the strengths of the Big Five/Five-Factor Model as a common taxonomy of personality traits), and in current practice the terms are often used interchangeably. A subtle but sometimes important area of disagreement between the lexical and questionnaire approaches is over the definition and interpretation of the fifth factor, called Intellect/Imagination by many lexical researchers and Openness to Experience by many questionnaire researchers. This issue is discussed in the aforementioned chapter.

Five-Factor Theory, formulated by Robert (Jeff) McCrae and Paul Costa (see, for example, their 2008 Handbook of Personality chapter), is an explanatory account of the role of the Big Five factors in personality. Five-Factor Theory includes a number of propositions about the nature, origins, and developmental course of personality traits, and about the relation of traits to many of the other personality variables mentioned earlier. Five-Factor Theory presents a biological account of personality traits, in which learning and experience play little if any part in influencing the Big Five.

Five-Factor Theory is not the only theoretical account of the Big Five. Other personality psychologists have proposed that environmental influences, such as social roles, combine and interact with biological influences in shaping personality traits. For example, Brent Roberts has recently advanced an interactionist approach under the name Social Investment Theory.

Finally, it is important to note that the Big Five are used in many areas of psychological research in ways that do not depend on the specific propositions of any one theory. For example, in interpersonal perception research the Big Five are a useful model for organizing people's perceptions of one another's personalities. I have argued that the Big Five are best understood as a model of reality-based person perception. In other words, it is a model of what people want to know about one another (Srivastava, 2010).

Regardless of whether you endorse any particular theory of personality traits, it is still quite possible that you will benefit from measuring and thinking about the Big Five in your research.

"I feel like most people skip too many steps. They're locked into frameworks of meaning that I neither identify with nor see as necessary or useful in the process of developing understanding. Of course, the ability to imagine new interpretations and platforms for understanding is the most important thing for me, though it's often difficult to convince others to peel away their own perspectives enough to even notice the sorts of conceptual leaps that strike me on a near-constant basis. I like to solve problems by stepping back and adjusting the building blocks that the whole issue is founded on: if you're not willing to do this, you're inevitably going to miss something that might completely change everything. And where would you be then? When you really understand something thoroughly, the answers will jump out at you so clearly that the problem practically solves itself. If that hasn't happened yet, then you're still missing something or looking at the problem the wrong way."