The Big Five Personality Traits Explained
Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism: what each trait measures, how stable they are, and how they differ from MBTI.
If you read a personality report written by a psychologist, there is a good chance it uses the Big Five. The model describes personality with five broad dimensions, each running from low to high. It is the most widely used framework in academic personality research, and it is the basis for our Big Five personality test. Here is what each trait means, where the model comes from, and how far it can be trusted.
Where it comes from
The model grew out of the lexical hypothesis: the idea that the personality differences that matter most to people become part of everyday language. In the 1930s Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert collected thousands of English words describing personality. Later researchers, among them Raymond Cattell, Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg, reduced these descriptors with factor analysis and repeatedly found five broad clusters. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae developed the NEO inventories around the same five factors. Goldberg created the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), from which our items are adapted.
The five traits
You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN.
Openness to experience
Curiosity, imagination and willingness to try new ideas. People high in openness enjoy abstract ideas, art, and novelty. People low in openness prefer the familiar, the concrete and the practical. Neither is better: openness helps in creative or exploratory work, and a preference for routine helps in tasks that reward consistency.
Conscientiousness
Organisation, self-discipline, dependability and goal-directed behaviour. This is the trait most consistently linked to job performance and academic achievement across studies. Very high scores can show up as perfectionism or rigidity, and low scores as spontaneity or disorganisation.
Extraversion
Sociability, assertiveness, energy and positive emotion. Extraverts tend to seek stimulation and company; introverts tend to prefer quieter settings. It is a spectrum, and many people are in the middle (sometimes called ambiverts).
Agreeableness
Warmth, trust, cooperativeness and concern for others. Highly agreeable people are accommodating; people lower on this trait are more competitive, sceptical and direct. Low agreeableness can be an asset in negotiation or critical evaluation.
Neuroticism
The tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, worry and low mood, and to react strongly to stress. Often called by its opposite, emotional stability. Higher neuroticism is associated with a greater risk of anxiety and depression, but it also predicts vigilance and careful planning.
Facets: each trait has parts
Every domain contains narrower facets. The NEO PI-R, for example, divides each trait into six: conscientiousness includes competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline and deliberation. Two people with the same domain score can differ in their facets, which is why short tests give a coarse picture.
How stable are the traits?
Personality is fairly stable but not frozen. Over periods of several years in adulthood, people's rank order on the Big Five stays highly consistent: test-retest correlations are commonly in the range of 0.6 to 0.8 or higher. But average levels shift with age. A large meta-analysis (Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer, 2006) found that, on average, people become more socially dominant, more conscientious and more emotionally stable from young adulthood into middle age, a pattern sometimes called the maturity principle. Individual change is possible, especially with major life changes and, to a modest extent, deliberate effort.
Nature and nurture
Twin and family studies suggest that roughly 40–50% of the variation in Big Five traits is attributable to genetic differences, with the rest due to environment and measurement error. These numbers describe populations, not individuals, and they do not mean personality is fixed.
Does it hold across cultures?
The five-factor structure has been found in many languages and cultures (McCrae and Terracciano, 2005), though the fit is weaker in some societies, and some researchers argue for six factors (HEXACO, which adds honesty-humility). The Big Five is a useful summary, not a final truth.
Big Five versus MBTI
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people into 16 types based on four either-or choices. Personality psychologists prefer the Big Five for several reasons: traits are continuous (most people are near the middle, not at one of two poles), the Big Five has stronger evidence for reliability and for predicting outcomes, and a significant share of MBTI takers receive a different type when retested after a few weeks. The MBTI remains popular for team workshops, but it is not standard in research.
What your results are, and are not
- Our test is a self-report questionnaire of 50 items. It reflects how you see yourself, and people differ in how accurately they do. Social desirability can nudge answers.
- Scores out of 100 show where your answers fall within the possible range for each trait. They are not a ranking against a representative sample of people. See our methodology.
- No trait score is good or bad in itself. What fits depends on the environment.
- The Big Five describes tendencies, not destiny, and it is not a clinical tool.
For help reading individual scores, see how to read low, average and high Big Five scores.
Sources
- Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26–42.
- Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
- Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25.
- McCrae, R. R., & Terracciano, A. (2005). Universal features of personality traits from the observer's perspective: Data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(3), 547–561.
- Jang, K. L., Livesley, W. J., & Vernon, P. A. (1996). Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets. Journal of Personality, 64(3), 577–592.
- Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1–26.