“Big Five” Personality Traits

Later refined as the Five-Factor Model (FFM): The “Big Five” personality traits — remembered as the acronym OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) — reflect how we think, feel, and behave. This picture of our personality makes us unique and figures in to romance, friendships, careers, hobbies. Individual characteristics and patterns of behavior can then predict or explain behavior. This concept emerged from generations of personality research, with Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert initially listing thousands of descriptive terms in the 1930s. Others narrowed it to five. Lewis Goldberg coined the “Big Five” term and developed the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a psychometric test to measure these traits. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae developed FFM. According to studies of twins, 40%–60% of the variations of the FFM traits are heritable—the rest, environmental.  Although the Big Five are conceptually independent from each other, most studies suggest small-to-moderate associations between them:

• Openness captures imagination and intellectual curiosity.
• Conscientiousness refers to carefulness and organizational ability.
• Extraversion is about positive emotions, like gregariousness, and a tendency to seek stimulation.
• Agreeableness describes our level of cooperativeness and compassion.
• Neuroticism, commonly seen as emotional instability, with negative emotions, anxiety, depression.