Big Five Personality Factors
1949
Donald W. Fiske (1916–2003)
In the twentieth century, the ancient Humoral Theory found a new expression in the development of trait theories of personality. In psychology, the word trait refers to a person’s enduring pattern of thinking and acting. How does one decide what a trait is? One common way is to follow the lexical hypothesis theory, which suggests that descriptions of personality are encoded in a culture’s language. Once these words have been identified, then a complex statistical technique called factor analysis can be used to discover how they hang together in factors or groupings. In 1949, psychologist Donald Fiske was the first to propose that there are five basic factors that can account for human personality. Ironically, Fiske later strongly disagreed with how his work was interpreted by other personality researchers.
The idea of five basic factors was picked up again in the 1960s, but it was not until the 1980s that the current form of the “Big Five” was developed. As expressed by psychologists Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1976, human personality can be described using just five broad terms: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (or OCEAN). The associated personality test is the NEO Personality Index—Revised (NEO-PI-R), in which N stands for “neuroticism,” E stands for “extroversion,” and O stands for “openness to experience.” Examples of descriptors for each factor might be as follows. A person who scores high on openness to experience is intellectually curious, while someone with a high rating on conscientiousness is responsible. For the factor of extroversion, the high scorer is characterized as action oriented, while for agreeableness, others see that person as easy to get along with. Finally, for neuroticism, a high scorer is anxious, while a low scorer is calm. There are important cross-cultural differences, too, as some of the Big Five traits are not present in certain cultures, especially those where research shows that other factors, such as interpersonal relatedness, are also important.
SEE ALSO Culture and Personality (1935), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (1940)
Human emotions and expression, copperplate engraving from 1749 appearing as Plate VIII in Volume II of L’ Histoire Naturelle by naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon.