Big Five personality traits
In psychology and psychometrics, the big five personality trait 'model or five-factor model —sometimes called by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE'—is a scientific model for measuring and describing human personality traits. The framework groups variation in personality into five separate factors, all measured on a continuous scale:
- openness measures creativity, curiosity, and willingness to entertain new ideas.
- conscientiousness measures self-control, diligence, and attention to detail.
- extraversion measures boldness, energy, and social interactivity.
- agreeableness measures kindness, helpfulness, and willingness to cooperate.
- neuroticism measures depression, irritability, and proneness to anxiety.
Research into personality inventories found five broad dimensions could explain most variation in human personality and temperament, with more-detailed analyses typically dividing the traits into more specific subfactors. For example, extraversion is typically associated with qualities such as gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement-seeking, warmth, activity, and positive emotions. Other models, like HEXACO, supplement the Big 5 traits with additional variables.
History
The Big Five model originated from the lexical hypothesis, which suggests that the most important personality traits are encoded in language. Raymond Cattell built upon earlier lexical work by reducing thousands of descriptors to 16 personality factors, later clustered into five global traits, which some consider the "original Big Five". Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal then analyzed peer ratings of U.S. Air Force officers and derived five core dimensions: Surgency, Agreeableness, Dependability, Emotional Stability, and Culture—an approach later popularized by Warren Norman. In the 1980s, John M. Digman and colleagues consolidated evidence from previous studies and reaffirmed five major traits, while Paul Costa Jr and Robert R. McCrae developed the NEO model, starting with three factors and expanding it into the widely accepted Five Factor Model. These four sets of researchers used somewhat different methods in finding the five traits, making the sets of five factors have varying names and meanings. However, all have been found to be strongly correlated with their corresponding factors.In 1884, British scientist Sir Francis Galton became the first person known to consider deriving a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits by sampling language. The idea that this may be possible is known as the lexical hypothesis.
British-American psychologist William McDougall of Duke University, writing in 1932, put forward a conjecture observing that "five distinguishable but separable factors" could be identified when looking at personality. His suggestions, "intellect, character, temperament, disposition and temper", have been seen as "anticipating" the adoption of the Big Five model in subsequent years. The model was built on understanding the relationship between personality and academic behaviour.
In 1936, American psychologists Gordon Allport of Harvard University and Henry Odbert of Dartmouth College implemented the lexical hypothesis. They organised for three anonymous people to categorise adjectives from Webster's New International Dictionary and a list of common slang words. The result was a list of 4504 adjectives they believed were descriptive of observable and relatively permanent traits.
In 1943, British-American psychologist Raymond Cattell of Harvard University took Allport and Odbert's list and reduced this to a list of roughly 160 terms by eliminating words with very similar meanings. To these, he added terms from 22 other psychological categories, and additional "interest" and "abilities" terms. This resulted in a list of 171 traits. From this he used factor analysis to derive 60 "personality clusters or syndromes" and an additional 7 minor clusters. Cattell then narrowed this down to 35 terms, and later added a 36th factor in the form of an IQ measure. Through factor analysis from 1945 to 1948, he created 11 or 12 factor solutions.
In 1947, German-British psychologist Hans Eysenck of University College London published his book Dimensions of Personality. He posited that the two most important personality dimensions were "Extraversion" and "Neuroticism", a term that he coined.
In July 1949, American psychologist Donald Fiske of the University of Chicago used 22 terms either directly taken or adapted from Cattell's 1947 study, and through surveys of male university students and statistics derived five factors: "Social Adaptability", "Emotional Control", "Conformity", "Inquiring Intellect", and "Confident Self-expression".
In the same year, Cattell,, found 4 factors in addition to those they had found before, which they believed consisted of information that could only be provided through self-rating. With this understanding, they created and published the sixteen factor 16PF Questionnaire.
In 1953, John W French of Educational Testing Service published an extensive meta-analysis of personality trait factor studies.
In 1957, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, research psychologists at the Lackland Air Force Base, undertook a personality trait study of US Air Force officers. Each was rated by their peers using Cattell's 35 terms. In 1958, Tupes and Christal began a US Air Force study by taking 37 personality factors and other data found in Cattell's 1947 paper, Fiske's 1949 paper, and Tupes' 1957 paper. Through statistical analysis, they derived five factors they labeled "Surgency", "Agreeableness", "Dependability", "Emotional Stability", and "Culture". In addition to the influence of Cattell and Fiske's work, they strongly noted the influence of French's 1953 study. Tupes and Christal further tested and explained their 1958 work in a 1961 paper.
Warren Norman of the University of Michigan replicated Tupes and Christal's work in 1963. He relabeled "Surgency" as "Extroversion or Surgency", and "Dependability" as "Conscientiousness". He also found four subordinate scales for each factor. Norman's paper was much more read than Tupes and Christal's papers had been. Norman's later Oregon Research Institute colleague Lewis Goldberg continued this work.
In the 4th edition of the 16PF Questionnaire released in 1968, 5 "global factors" derived from the 16 factors were identified: "Extraversion", "Independence", "Anxiety", "Self-control" and "Tough-mindedness". 16PF advocates have since called these "the original big five".
In 1978, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae of the National Institutes of Health published a book chapter describing their Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness model. The model was based on the three factors in its name. They used Eysenck's concept of "Extraversion" rather than Carl Jung's. Each factor had six facets. The authors expanded their explanation of the model in subsequent papers.
Also in 1978, British psychologist Peter Saville of Brunel University applied statistical analysis to 16PF results, and determined that the model could be reduced to five factors, "Anxiety", "Extraversion", "Warmth", "Imagination" and "Conscientiousness".
At a 1980 symposium in Honolulu, Lewis Goldberg, Naomi Takemoto-Chock, Andrew Comrey, and John M. Digman, reviewed the available personality instruments of the day. In 1981, Digman and Takemoto-Chock of the University of Hawaiʻi reanalysed data from Cattell, Tupes, Norman, Fiske and Digman. They re-affirmed the validity of the five factors, naming them "Friendly Compliance vs. Hostile Non-compliance", "Extraversion vs. Introversion", "Ego Strength vs. Emotional Disorganization", "Will to Achieve" and "Intellect". They also found weak evidence for the existence of a sixth factor, "Culture".
Peter Saville and his team included a five-factor "Pentagon" model as part of the Occupational Personality Questionnaires in 1984. This was the first commercially available Big Five test. Its factors are "Extroversion", "Vigorous", "Methodical", "Emotional Stability", and "Abstract".
This was closely followed by another commercial test, the NEO PI three-factor personality inventory, published by Costa and McCrae in 1985. It used the three NEO factors. The methodology employed in constructing the NEO instruments has since been subject to critical scrutiny.
In 1990, J.M. Digman further advanced his five-factor model of personality, which Goldberg put at the highest organised level.
In 1992, the NEO PI evolved into the NEO PI-R, adding the factors "Agreeableness" and "Conscientiousness", and becoming a Big Five instrument. This set the names for the factors that are now most commonly used. The NEO maintainers called their model the "Five Factor Model". Each NEO personality dimension has six subordinate facets.
Wim Hofstee at the University of Groningen used a lexical hypothesis approach with the Dutch language to develop what became the International Personality Item Pool in the 1990s. Further development in Germany and the United States saw the pool based on three languages. Its questions and results have been mapped to various Big Five personality typing models.
Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton released a book describing their HEXACO model in 2004. It adds a sixth factor, "Honesty-Humility" to the five. Each of these factors has four facets.
In 2007, Colin DeYoung, Lena C. Quilty and Jordan Peterson concluded that the 10 aspects of the Big Five may have distinct biological substrates. This was derived through factor analyses of two data samples with the International Personality Item Pool, followed by cross-correlation with scores derived from 10 genetic factors identified as underlying the shared variance among the Revised NEO Personality Inventory facets.
By 2009, personality and social psychologists generally agreed that both personal and situational variables are needed to account for human behavior.
An FFM-associated test was used by Cambridge Analytica, and was part of the "psychographic profiling" controversy during the 2016 US presidential election.