How Did We End up With 5 Big Factors of Personality?

Source: Al Les/Pixabay

As a result of the person-situation debate in psychology and the fact that the study of stable characteristics entered into a lengthy and productive time period, there is now consensus that human personality is comprised of five major factors: Extroversion, Openness to Experience/Intellect, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism/Emotional Stability.

The story of these five personality dimensions involves two research programs with separate histories. Two research groups in the 1970s, one led by Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg and the other by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae, pushed forward the view that the most meaningful aspects of human personality can be captured using five dimensions.

Lexically Derived Big Five

One research program, guided by a lexical approach and started in the 1930s by Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert, paved the way for the eventual conclusion that personality can be described by five largely independent dimensions. The “lexical hypothesis” assumes that the most significant differences between individuals eventually become encoded in the natural language (Goldberg, 1981).

In 1936, Allport and Odbert curated a list of approximately 18,000 unabridged dictionary adjectives describing personality. In the years that followed, the list of terms was factor analyzed, reduced, and reanalyzed by a number of researchers. The findings were ultimately published with factor labels: Extroversion/Surgency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Culture.

In one of the most scientifically compelling early examples of what is now known as the Big Five-factor structure, Warren Norman articulated the logic behind the lexical approach:

“Attempts to construct taxonomies of personality characteristics have ordinarily taken as an initial data base some set of perceptible variations in performance and appearance between persons or within individuals over time and varying situations. By far the most general efforts to specify the domain of phenomena on which to base such a system have proceeded from an examination of the natural language” (Norman, 1963, p. 574).

The phrase “Big Five” was coined by Lewis Goldberg in 1981, and "Culture" was exchanged for "Intellect" as the fifth-factor label.

A number of trait adjective scales have been developed by personality psychologists to measure Big-Five dimensions. These lexical Big-Five inventories include Goldberg’s Big-Five Factor Markers (1992), the Abridged Five-Factor Circumplex (AB5C; Hofstee, De Raad, & Goldberg, 1992), 10 Aspects of the Big Five (DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007), Saucier’s 7 Factor Scales (1997), and the Interpersonal Circumplex (Markey & Markey, 2009). These scales vary in length, with some including shorter and longer versions (e.g., 50 and 100-item versions of Goldberg's scale, 1992).

Based on the list of scales presented here, it should be evident that there are many different inventories that allow for the measurement of Big-Five factors, not just one “Big-Five Personality Inventory.” To avoid any confusion, the expression “Big-Five Inventory” (BFI) refers to a copyrighted inventory that consists of 44 short phrases and is available through the author’s website (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991). It is among the many ways to evaluate personality using five major variables.

Five-Factor Model (FFM)

The second history of the five personality factors was informed by earlier lexical research and relies on comparisons with other major personality questionnaires. The logic is that scales in existing personality questionnaires are all essentially related to the Five-Factor Model (henceforth, FFM). Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience comprise the five basic factors underlying personality.

The differences between the Big Five and FFM are minimal. Other than Emotional Stability replacing the name and measuring the opposite of the Neuroticism scale, the first four factors are the same. The contrast between Intellect and Openness to Experience is the greatest difference between the two approaches. Openness to Experience measures imagination, an interest in new activities, and creativity, while Intellect measures a tendency toward intelligence and an intellectual style.

Personality Essential Reads

Why Do Antagonistic People Think They’re So Perfect?

Do Only Jerks Eat Meat?

Developed from research on Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), the scale most widely associated with the FFM is the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience (NEO) were found to be three primary factors that emerged from analyses of Cattell’s 16PF. From this, the Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) was constructed and later revised (NEO PI-R). The NEO PI-R is not the only questionnaire derived from the FFM approach. Several researchers have designed measures based on the FFM with 120 items.

More Than Five Factors?

Although there is general agreement among personality psychologists concerning the value of using an approach that has five core dimensions, the acceptance is not universal. A number of researchers have taken up positions that favor trait models with greater than five factors. For example, the HEXACO-PI includes factors that map onto the traditional five factors with the addition of Honesty/Humility as the sixth factor (Lee & Ashton, 2004). The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is comprised of seven primary scales, six occupational scales, and 42 subscales (Hogan & Hogan, 1992). Jackson, Paunonen, and Tremblay (2000) developed the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (6FPQ) to measure six domains and 18 facets. In this model, Conscientiousness is separated into Methodicalness and Industriousness. The Independence factor is related to low scores on Neuroticism. Each of these six factors contains three narrower facets.

Copyright © 2021 Kevin Bennett, Ph.D. All rights reserved.