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.
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