What is Big Five personality?
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It is a model meant to show the dimensions of personalities. As someone once said; all models are wrong. Some models are useful. The Big 5 is not the end all-be all of psychology obviously, but it can be useful in the same way a globe can be useful. A globe is missing a lot of details, its very low resolution. Similar thing here.
What’s notable is that the Big 5 came about untheorized. It was not a hypothesis that someone came up with and then tested; it arose “naturally” simply by collecting enough data and looking for trends. And that’s all it really is: the idea that some personality traits TEND to lump together. Not always. But across large sample sizes, then tend to group up.
For example, let’s take the following statements: “I always keep my room organized” and “I always do my homework right when I get home”. Both of those statements would fall under the Conscientiousness category. That means that, ON AVERAGE, people who agree with one tend to agree with the other. Not always; you can imagine a messy person who is very punctual about homework, or a neat freak who doesn’t care about homework. But they often come as a pair (or not).
Now imagine there are hundreds of thousands of these basic personality descriptors, and they tend to lump together. That’s it. That’s the Big 5. Of course, nobody is 100% Agreeable or 100% Extroverted. We all are a weird, unique mishmash of these descriptors. If you are high in Extroversion, there are certainly some Extroversion traits you don’t have. But there are many that you do have (since that’s kinda what it means to be high in Extroversion).
As for its usefulness; like the globe, it lets us get a feel for something that’s really big. We can get find broad trends that we might otherwise miss.
Have you heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?
If so, you should know that it’s considered mostly useless junk by actual psychologists. Few to none of them see much value in its personality profiles.
“Big Five” is a personality model meant to actually describe real human personality. Which means it doesn’t sort you into ~~Hogwarts houses~~ “personality types,” it just describes how much you display (or don’t display) five key personality traits: agreeableness, extraversion, openness to (new) experience, neuroticism, and conscientiousness.
You could think of these as being, more or less
* Agreeableness: How much you favor social harmony, cooperation, compromise, and teamwork vs self-interest, competition, skepticism, and individual action
* Extraversion: How sociable, energetic, and emotive you are when interacting with other people, vs feeling drained by social contact and generally keeping things to yourself
* Openness to Experience: the degree to which you are curious, imaginative, and creative, vs traditionalist, down to earth, and conventional
* Neuroticism: how prone you are to being “stressed out” and to unstable or dramatic mood shifts, vs being mostly calm, stable, and resilient
* Conscientiousness: How much you value planning, organization, structure, and fine detail vs spontaneity, flexibility, adaptation, and broad strokes.
It’s a model for showing personality traits as a rough summary, kinda like the Meyers Briggs stuff. you’ll also see it as OCEAN
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
The big five model focuses a lot on interpersonal interaction style compared to some of the other models which try to gauge more of what’s going on internally but…it’s all just models.
I used to work at a place that did personality assessments and it was a lot of fun to get the psychologists ranting on these. They have a lot of issues when you start trying to make them predictive
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