Big Five personality traits

 

In contemporary psychology, the Big Five factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which have been scientifically discovered to define human personality.

The initial model was advanced by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Cristal, based on work done at the U.S. Air Force Personnel Laboratory in the late 1950s; unfortunately, they documented their work only in an obscure technical report (Tupes, E.C., & Cristal, R.E., Recurrent Personality Factors Based on Trait Ratings. Technical Report ASD-TR-61-97, Lackland Air Force Base, TX: Personnel Laboratory, Air Force Systems Command, 1961). In 1990 J.M. Digman advanced his five factor model of personality and Goldman extended it to the highest level of organization (Goldberg, 1993).[1] These five over-arching domains have been found to contain and subsume more-or-less all known personality traits within their five domains and to represent the basic structure behind all personality traits. They have brought order to the often-bewildering array of specific lower-level personality concepts that are constantly being proposed by psychologists, which are often found to be overlapping and confusing. These five factors provide a rich conceptual framework for integrating all the research findings and theory in personality psychology. The big five traits are also referred to as the Five Factor Model or FFM (Costa & McCrae, 1992),[2] and as the Global Factors of personality (Russell & Karol, 1994).[3]

The Big Five model is considered to be one of the most comprehensive, empirical, data-driven research findings in the history of personality psychology. Identifying the traits and structure of human personality has been one of the most fundamental goals in all of psychology. Over three or four decades of research, these five broad factors were gradually discovered and defined by several independent sets of researchers (Digman, 1990).[4]

The Big five factors are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN, or CANOE if rearranged). The Neuroticism factor is sometimes referred to as Emotional Stability. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret the Openness factor, which is sometimes called "Intellect".[25] Each factor consists of a cluster of more specific traits that correlate together. For example, extroversion includes such related qualities as sociability, excitement seeking, impulsiveness, and positive emotions.
The Five Factor Model is a purely descriptive model of personality, but psychologists have developed a number of theories to account for the Big Five.