The Big Five

12 Key excerpts on "The Big Five"

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  Personality

  Theory and Research

  • Daniel Cervone, Lawrence A. Pervin(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Research Evidence 209 emotional stability with a broad range of negative feelings, including anxiety, sadness, irritabil- ity, and nervous tension. Openness to experience describes the breadth, depth, and complexity of an individual’s mental and experiential life. Extraversion and Agreeableness both summarize traits that are interpersonal; that is, they capture what people do with each other and to each other. Finally, Conscientiousness primarily describes task- and goal-directed behavior and socially required impulse control. Personality and the Brain The Big Five Personality psychologists first found The Big Five per- sonality trait dimensions when analyzing questionnaire responses. Can they also find them when analyzing the brain? Relating brain regions to Big Five scores is difficult. There are so many neural subsystems and so many interconnections among them in the brain that it’s hard to know where to look. A theoretical analysis of psychological processes that are central to each Big Five dimension can be a helpful guide, as shown by recent theory and research by DeYoung and colleagues. These investigators (DeYoung et al., 2010) obtained Big Five scores for a set of 116 adult research partic- ipants. They then obtained whole-brain images for each participant (using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI) and, using the images, looked for variations in brain volume that might be linked to variations in Big Five scores. The reasoning behind this approach is that greater volume in a specific brain region may indicate a greater psychological capacity to perform activities for which that region is needed. They found that: — people with higher levels of extraversion had larger brain volume in a region of the frontal cortex that contributes to the processing of information about environmental rewards. This supports the idea that the pursuit of rewarding experiences is a core fea- ture of extraversion.

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  Personality

  Theory and Research

  • Daniel Cervone, Lawrence A. Pervin(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  For example, the compulsive personality might be seen as someone extremely high on both Conscientiousness and Neuroticism, and the antisocial personality as someone extremely low on both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Thus, it may be the pattern of scores on the five factors that are most impor- tant. This suggests that the five-factor framework would prove valuable not only as a taxonomy of individual differences in everyday personality functioning but also as a tool for clinical diagnosis. Some use The Big Five model as part of the selection and planning of psychological treatments (Harkness & Lilienfeld, 1997). An understanding of an individual’s personality traits may help a therapist to select an optimal form of therapy (Widiger & Smith, 2008) and to anticipate prob- lems that may occur in the therapy process. Individuals higher in Openness, for example, may profit more from therapies that encourage exploration and fantasy than would others. For any gamers out there, we note the following. A meta-analysis has related Big Five scores to online gaming. Specifically, researchers reviewed studies that had related personality traits scores either to measures of time spent gaming or to self-reports on a gaming addiction scale. In this case, however, most Big Five scores were unrelated to gaming. Among the OCEAN, O, E, A, and N were not consistently related to gaming. Regarding C, people lower in conscientiousness were more likely to be gaming (Akbari et al., 2021). But, in general, global personality traits are not predictive in this domain; apparently, a wide variety of different personalities are gamers. In summary, the five-factor model has proven to have numerous valuable applications across diverse areas. Big five measures frequently predict individual differences in consequential out- comes. These numerous positive findings attest to the value of the model. Yet, The Big Five model is limited in other respects.

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  Personality, Values, Culture

  An Evolutionary Approach

  • Ronald Fischer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter, I mainly deal with the first problem. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with issues of context and language. The most widely accepted and used framework for studying personality in this tradition today is what is variably known as the five-factor model (FFM), Big5, or Big Five (Goldberg, 1981; McCrae & John, 1992). There are various tests that have been developed in this tradition, including the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) (Costa & McCrae, 1992), The Big Five Inventory (BFI; Benet-Martínez & John, 1998; Soto & John, 2009), and freely available open-source versions such as the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg et al., 2006). All these instruments typically ask respondents to report whether they agree with statements, such as “I see myself as someone who . . . tends to be lazy” or “is outgoing, sociable” (e.g., from the BFI); “I am not a worrier” or “I sometimes lose interest if people talk about abstract matters” (NEO-PI-R); or “I am the life of the party” or “I get stressed out easily” (IPIP). The various approaches to measuring these five factors typically agree on the number of factors (even though they use different labels). There is also consensus on some but not all of the content of these factors across the 30 The Big Five Personality Traits and Human Values different questionnaires. In this book, I use the terminology of the NEO- PI-R developed by Robert (Jeff) McCrae and Paul Costa. The basic five major dimensions in this model are called Conscientiousness (C), Agree- ableness (A), Neuroticism (N), Openness (O), and Extraversion (E). The NEO-PI was developed from an earlier three-dimensional model of person- ality first developed by Hans Eysenck (Barrett, Petrides, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1998; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1965). 1 Goldberg’s (1993) work was instrumental in increasing the acceptance of the five factors among the larger academic community.

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  The Developing Structure of Temperament and Personality From Infancy To Adulthood

  • Charles F. Halverson, Jr., Gedolph A. Kohnstamm, Roy P. Martin, Charles F. Halverson, Geldolph A. Kohnstamm(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  implicit relations revealed when the theorist actually maps the facets of The Big Five model into his own theoretical structure. And, finally, we examine the relations between three important individual differences—intelligence, self-esteem, and sociopolitical attitudes—within this same five-factor framework.

  The Big Five Factor Structure

  The current five-factor representation was initially stimulated by Tupes and Christal (1961), who reanalyzed previous data sets using bipolar variables originally coastructed by Cattell (1943, 1947). The Big Five factors are typically numbered and labeled: (I) Surgency (or Extraversion); (II) Agreeableness; (III) Conscientiousness; (IV) Emotional Stability; and (V) either Intellect or Openness to Experience. Given the strong consensus that has been emerging about the general nature of The Big Five domains, the disagreement about the specific nature of factor V is somewhat of a scientific embarrassment. The history of this controversy is included in several recent reviews of The Big Five model (e.g., Digman, 1990; John, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992; Wiggins & Pincus, 1992; Wiggins & Trapnell, in press).

  Building on the earlier work of Allport and Odbert (1936) and Cattell (1947), Norman (1967) and Goldberg (1982, 1990) have been able to analyze a far larger and more representative pool of English trait terms than has been studied in the past, thereby providing more compelling evidence for the five-factor structure of the personality lexicon. For example, to establish the across-method generality of trait factor structures, Goldberg (1990) used 1,431 trait adjectives grouped into 75 clusters, and found virtually identical Big Five representations in 10 analyses, each based on a different factor analytic procedure. In a second study of 479 common trait adjectives grouped into 133 synonym clusters, Goldberg (1990) found the same five-factor structure in each of two samples of self ratings and each of two samples of peer ratings. None of the factors beyond the fifth generalized across the samples, thus establishing the generality of this structural representation across both targets and samples. In a third study, these synonym clusters were further refined by internal-consistency analyses, culminating in a set of 100 clusters derived from 339 trait adjectives.

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  Personality Traits

  • Gerald Matthews, Ian J. Deary, Martha C. Whiteman(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  An influential model from the last two decades of the twentieth century to date is the five factor model, which recognises personality variation along the lines of neuroticism, extraversion, openness/intellect, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. There is no single five factor model. Lexical versions sometimes find different num-bers and types of traits in different cultures. Questionnaire-based versions differ somewhat depending on the questionnaire. Some influential theories of personality have more or fewer than five traits. Nevertheless, just as complete consensus should not be claimed, neither should differences be exaggerated. Most personality theories and instruments have large overlaps with concepts contained in the five factor model. 5. Personality trait systems are descriptions of phenotypes. Validating these sys-tems requires finding out the causes and the consequences of personality traits. Further reading Boyle, G. J., Matthews, G. and Saklofske, D. H. (eds.) (2008) Handbook of personality theory and assessment , vol. 2: Personality measurement and testing . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Raad, B. and Perugini, M. (2002) Big Five assessment . Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber. McCrae, R. (2009) The Five-Factor Model of personality traits: consensus and con-troversy. In P. L. Corr and G. Matthews (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of personality psychology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 Persons, situations and interactionism In chapter 1 , we introduced the essentials of trait theory. We saw how personal-ity might be characterised in terms of broad dimensions related to a variety of behaviours, including responses to personality questionnaires. We saw, too, that psychometrics provides statistical tools for identifying these dimensions, and that the use of techniques such as factor analysis has provided the beginnings of a con-sensus on personality structure.

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  The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Sport and Exercise Psychology

  Volume 1: Theoretical and Methodological Concepts

  • Dieter Hackfort, Robert Schinke, Dieter Hackfort, Robert Schinke, Dieter Hackfort, Robert J. Schinke(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 Five-factor model (Big 5) and its relation to sporting performance Iain Greenlees Introduction Historically, a fundamental challenge for personality psychologists has been to summarize the numerous personality descriptors that exist (as evidenced through the thousands of words used to describe such characteristics) into a manageable number of constructs that adequately describe the organization of human traits (McCrae & Costa, 2008). Although the 1950s to the 1980s saw little agreement on the nature of such a structure, the 1990s saw the formation of a relatively stable consensus that endorses five broad and general dimensions. Indeed, since its emergence through the work of Paul Costa and Robert McCrae (McCrae & Costa, 1989, 1999, 2008; McCrae & John, 1992), the five-factor model (FFM or Big 5) has become, “unquestionably, the most ubiquitous and widely accepted trait framework in the history of personality psychology” (Judge & Zapata, 2015, p. 1150). Although there have been criticisms of the Big 5, and alternative structures have been suggested (e.g., Ashton & Lee., 2005), it does remain one of the most commonly used frameworks when conceptualizing and studying personality. The fundamental postulate of the FFM (McCrae & Costa, 2008) is that personality traits can be classified under one of five superordinate dimensions. These genetically and environmentally determined dimensions, which develop throughout childhood but thereafter are relatively stable, are neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (see Table 1 for further information and an explanation of the key facets of each of the dimensions). By extension, McCrae and Costa assert that all individuals (across all cultures) can be characterized according to their standing on the five dimensions

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  The 2nd Language of Leadership

  • Michael P. Quirk, Patricia M. Fandt(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Goldberg and Digman recognized that prediction is part of the scientific endeavor and encouraged other researchers studying personality and behavior to consider testing the Big 5 model. Their motive was to ensure that the future beyond their initial efforts would not be impeded. Goldberg and Digman were influential in encouraging two other behavioral scientists, Costa and McCrae to use the Big 5 factors in their “Does Personality Change Research?” From that effort, Costa and McCrae developed a method of measuring this with their instrument called the NEO-PI as we discussed earlier. They worked with the Big 5 approach in extending the research base from description to prediction. Costa and McCrae vary some from Goldberg and Digman on how to conceptualize the work to include Extraversion. Also, Costa and McCrae called their perspective the Five Factor Approach rather than the Big 5. At the risk of offending the originators, we simply refer to this collective work as the Big 5.

  What matters is that the Big 5 is an easily applicable approach. It is helpful because it is a theory that relates to your life experiences. In other words, it is a familiar language. The very words we use in our everyday discourse to describe ourselves are the foundation terms in the Big 5.

  To make this a serviceable model for you it is not necessary to learn the esoteric language of psychoanalysis and read all of Freud’s original works. Using the five categories Costa and McCrae developed—Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Neuroticism-Adjustment, Agreeableness, and Con- scientiousness —we don’t need to go far beyond the brief description of each concept to use their factors to describe categories of behavior (or in our case leadership effectiveness) and make predictions about how and how well a person might perform in the future.

  Let’s look at a well-known leader, Ted Waitt, founder and CEO of Gateway, and use the Big 5 model to describe his behaviors. Waitt demonstrates his remarkable Openness to Experience through risk-taking behaviors, looks for new ways to capture opportunities in the environment, and operates with the concept that there are usually numerous ways to solve problems. For example, he acts as a role model for employees and continually demonstrates an interest in feedback; he meets on a regular basis in colloquiums that are open gatherings for employees and the public where participants can ask questions and offer new ideas; he empowers employees to make decisions without strict bureaucratic policies; he fosters visionary leadership.

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  The Wiley Handbook of Personality Assessment

  • Updesh Kumar(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Regardless of the exact number of factors, all researchers agree that human personality can be described in a hierarchy of personality attributes ranging from broad to increasingly more specific factors (Dilchert, Ones, & Krueger, 2014; Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005; Ones et al., 2005). At the apex of the personality continuum is the general factor of personality (DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007). At the next level of the hierarchy are meta‐ traits (DeYoung, Peterson, & Higgins, 2002): Stability/Socialization (referred to as Factor Alpha by Digman (1997), describing a latent higher‐order factor of person- ality defined by the co‐variation between Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability), and Plasticity (referred to as Factor Beta by Digman (1997), describing a latent higher order factor of personality defined by the co‐variation between Extraversion and Openness). At the next level are The Big Five factors. The hierarchy continues under each of The Big Five. There is evidence for two aspects of each of The Big Five (DeYoung et al., 2007). The aspects of The Big Five are: Withdrawal and Volatility for Neuroticism, Assertiveness and Enthusiasm for Extraversion, Intellect and Experiencing for Openness, Compassion and Politeness for Agreeableness, and Industriousness and Orderliness for Conscientiousness. Facets of The Big Five are more specific constructs than aspects (e.g., Depression and Anxiety each are more specific than Withdrawal for Neuroticism). The precise number of empirically justifiable facets of each of The Big Five is an active research area (see Connelly, Ones, Davies, & Birkland, 2014, for Openness). A distinction can be made about pure and compound facets. Pure facets sample behaviors, cogni- tions, feelings, and tendencies from only one Big Five domain (e.g., Activity facet of Extraversion).

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology

  • Philip J. Corr, Gerald Matthews(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Staats Lecture for Contributions towards Unifying Psychology. What is it that researchers from so many disciplines have come to appreciate? As Digman and Inouye (1986) put it, ‘If a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors’ (p. 116). In other words, these five factors provide a structure in which most personality traits can be classified. This structure arises because traits co-vary. For example, people who are sociable and assertive tend also to be cheerful and energetic; they are high on the Extraversion (E) factor, which is said to be defined by sociability, assertive- ness, cheerfulness and energy. However, people who are sociable and assertive may or may not be intellectually curious and imaginative. Those traits define a separate factor, Openness to Experience (O). Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability (N), Agreeableness versus Antagonism (A), and Conscientiousness (C) are the remaining factors. There is a widespread consensus that these five factors are necessary and more- or-less sufficient to account for the co-variation of most personality traits, and it is Robert R. McCrae receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program, NIH, National Institute on Aging. 148 this comprehensiveness that chiefly accounts for the utility of the FFM. Researchers who wish to conduct a review of the literature on personality corre- lates typically find that many different scales and instruments have been used to assess personality. If each is assigned to one of the five factors, their results can be meaningfully combined. Again, the FFM provides a framework for systematic exploratory research. Suppose, for example, one wished to study the effects on personality of growing up in East versus West Germany (Angleitner and Ostendorf 2000).

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology

  • Philip J. Corr, Gerald Matthews(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In those analyses, not twelve but five factors were repeatedly considered to best summarize the various correlation matrices. Goldberg (1981) referred to that five-factorial structure as the “Big Five,” comprising Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emo- tional Stability (the opposite of Neuroticism) and Intellect. 116 BOELE DE RAAD AND DICK P. H. BARELDS Alternative Models of Personality In a parallel history to the unfolding of the psycho-lexical approach, several other independently developed person- ality structures entered the stage. Besides Cattell’s 16PF, there was Guilford’s model embodied in the Guilford– Zimmerman Temperament Survey (Guilford & Zimmer- man, 1949), and Eysenck’s three-factor model (Eysenck, 1952). Eysenck’s model is conveniently classified in this chapter together with additional psychobiological models of personality. In spirit, Guilford is closest to the psycho-lexical approach, although he did not start to design a complete structure of personality. Yet, the subsequent studies he performed resulted in an instrument that should enable a comprehensive portrait of someone’s personality. Starting with the application of a 36-item questionnaire (Guilford & Guilford, 1936), three clear factors, Introversion– Extraversion, Emotional Sensitivity and Masculinity– Femininity, and two less clear factors were found to sum- marize the items. In subsequent analyses with additional sets of items, additional factors were isolated, up to a list of thirteen primary factors (Guilford, 1975). Sells, Demaree and Will (1970, 1971) thoroughly compared the Cattell and Guilford structures, and found major com- monalities in only two factors, Emotional Stability and Social Extraversion, and some fifteen more factors for which one or the other system was primarily responsible.

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  Organizational Behavior

  • Michael A. Hitt, C. Chet Miller, Adrienne Colella, Maria Triana(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Fortunately, a consensus among personality experts has emerged with respect to the importance of five specific traits. These traits, collectively known as The Big Five, include extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to expe- rience, as shown in Exhibit 5-1. © gvillani/iStockphoto Fundamentals of Personality 143 Extraversion The extraversion trait was an important area of study for many well-known psychologists in the early-to-middle portion of the twentieth century, including Carl Jung, Hans Eysenck, and Raymond Cattell. For Jung and many of his contemporaries, this aspect of personality was considered the most important driver of behavior. Extraversion is the degree to which a person is outgoing and derives energy from being around other people. In more specific terms, it is the degree to which a person: (1) enjoys being around other people, (2) is warm to others, (3) speaks up in group settings, (4) maintains a vigorous pace, (5) likes excitement, and (6) is cheerful. 20 Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, clearly fits this mold. Research has shown that people scoring high on this dimension, known as extraverts, tend to have a modest but measurable performance advantage over introverts in occupa- tions requiring a high level of interaction with other people. 21 Specific occupations where extraverts have been found to perform particularly well include sales and management. In contrast, introverts, who do not score high on extraversion, tend to do particularly well in occupations such as accounting, engineering, and information technology, where more solitary work is frequently required. For any occupation where teams are central, or in a high-involvement organization where teams are emphasized, extraverts may also have a slight edge, as teams involve face-to-face interaction, group decision making, and nav- igation of interpersonal dynamics.

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  Human Facial Attractiveness in Psychological Research

  An Evolutionary Approach

  • Slávka Démuthová, Lenka Selecká, Andrej Démuth(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  However, in fact, if the assessors have access to certain physical facial characteristics, there is actually an agreement over the ascribed personality traits (for a review, see Zebrowitz and Collins 1997). For this reason it is possible that the consensus is the result of gener- ally shared stereotypes considered as indicators of the specific personality traits 147 . On the other hand, there is a certain agreement between the self-as- sessment of personality traits and personality traits estimated by others. One of the possible explanations for this potential agreement between self- assessment and the facially derived estimation of personality traits is that known as the Five Factor Model (FFM). The five main dimensions were created from the most common language descriptors of personality using factor analysis. 147 The link between facial features and personality characteristics of The Big Five may exist for other reasons as well. For example, Power and Pluess (2015) through a genomic-re- latedness-matrix residual maximum likelihood analysis (GREML) estimated the heritability of The Big Five personality factors in a sample of more than 5,000 Europeans from 527,469 single-nucleotide polymorphisms across the genome. They found significant and substan- tial heritability estimates mainly for neuroticism (p = 0.04) and openness (p < 0.01). Other studies (see e.g. Bouchard and McGue 2003; Vernon, Martin, Schermer, and Mackie 2008) also estimate that 40 – 60% of the variance of The Big Five personality factors is heritable. These findings lead us to the question of whether there is a genetic basis for the physical (facial features) and mental (personality traits) features of the individual Big Five factors. Of course, this hypothesis is yet to be empirically proved. 147 5 P e r s o n a l i t y C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s the individual’s temperament has the potential to affect facial appearance through the repetition of certain facial expressions.

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