The Big Five personality traits
Personality is not ability. The Big Five traits describe typical ways of feeling, thinking and acting, and they grew out of a simple idea: the words we use to describe people.
In this article
The word hypothesis
If a difference between people matters in everyday life, language ends up creating a word for it. This is the lexical hypothesis, which guided much of the research on personality in the 20th century. In 1936, Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert went through an English dictionary and listed about 18,000 words that described people.
The next step was to shrink that mountain. Researchers asked people to describe themselves, or people they knew, using lists of these terms, and applied factor analysis, a technique that groups words that tend to appear together. With different lists, in different samples, five broad groups kept emerging. Lewis Goldberg, who popularized the name “Big Five,” published a set of markers for each of them in 1992.
In parallel, Robert McCrae and Paul Costa arrived at a very similar structure by another route, with questionnaires, and showed that it held up both when people described themselves and when they were described by others. The convergence of different routes is one of the reasons for confidence in the model.
The five factors
| Trait | The high end tends toward | The low end tends toward |
|---|---|---|
| Openness | intellectual curiosity and a taste for ideas and art | a preference for the familiar and the concrete |
| Conscientiousness | organization and following through on commitments | spontaneity and less attachment to plans |
| Extraversion | sociability and energy in groups | reserve and a preference for calm settings |
| Agreeableness | cooperation and trust in others | bluntness and a willingness to confront |
| Emotional Stability | calm and quick recovery from setbacks | worry and sensitivity to stress |
In the research literature, the fifth factor usually appears under its opposite pole, with the name Neuroticism. On IQNorth it appears as Emotional Stability, with the note that it is a personality trait, not a measure of mental health. Neither pole is the “good” one: each has advantages in different situations.
IPIP: public-domain items
Many personality questionnaires are commercial: the items are owned by someone, and using them requires a license. Goldberg created an alternative, the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a bank of public-domain items that anyone can copy, translate and use. One of the instruments in the pool is a set of 50 statements that marks the five factors based on the 1992 work, with 10 statements per trait.
IQNorth's five-trait test uses this instrument: 50 statements, about 6 minutes. You say how well each statement describes you, and each trait gets a score from 0 to 100 calculated on your own response scale. These scores are not percentiles and do not say how many people scored above or below you, because there are no Brazilian norms for this test yet. The translation is our own and has not yet been validated, and this is stated in the test itself.
A trait is neither an ability nor a verdict
A reasoning test has right and wrong answers; a personality questionnaire does not. It records how you describe yourself, and so it varies with the day, with your mood and with your self-image. A high score in Openness says that you describe yourself as curious and interested in ideas. About solving problems better, it says nothing.
Nor is it a verdict. The five traits describe normal variation between people, and a low score in Emotional Stability does not indicate any disorder. If worry or stress is getting in the way of your life, the person who can help is a psychologist, and no online questionnaire replaces that conversation.
Personality describes how you tend to act. It does not measure how much you can do, and it does not serve as a verdict.
Why “learning styles” were left out
A widespread idea holds that each person learns best through one channel (visual, auditory or kinesthetic) and that teaching through the preferred channel improves learning. In 2008, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the research and defined the experiment that could test this hypothesis: sort people by style, teach each group both ways and see whether style changes which way works better. They found very few studies with this design, and the ones that existed contradicted the hypothesis.
Preferences exist. What is missing is evidence that teaching to the preference makes people learn more. That is why we do not offer a learning styles test.
What the learning profile measures
Instead, IQNorth offers a learning profile with IPIP scales tied to Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman's classification of character strengths, published in 2004. We chose three scales that concern your relationship with knowledge:
- Curiosity: interest in new things and pleasure in discovery.
- Love of learning: satisfaction in mastering a subject or a skill.
- Critical thinking: examining an idea from several sides before drawing a conclusion.
It is 29 statements, about 4 minutes, in the public domain, with scores from 0 to 100 on your own response scale. Like the Big Five, the profile describes dispositions you report, not an ability.
See also: Extra tests.
Sources
- Allport, G. W., and Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(1).
- Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26–42.
- McCrae, R. R., and Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 81–90.
- Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., and Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119.
- Peterson, C., and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
- International Personality Item Pool. ipip.ori.org.
