The Big Five personality traits, explained

What are the Big Five personality traits?

The Big Five are five broad dimensions along which people reliably differ: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, whose positive pole is usually called Emotional Stability. Each one is a summary of many narrower habits of feeling, thinking and acting that tend to travel together. Someone who enjoys parties also tends, on average, to talk more, act more assertively and report more positive mood, and that bundle is what Extraversion names. The model is a description of how those bundles organise, arrived at by measurement rather than invented from a theory of the mind (Digman, 1990).

Two things follow. The dimensions are continuous, so a score places you relative to other people rather than sorting you into a category. And they are broad, so each contains narrower traits, called facets, which can differ inside a single score: two people with identical Extraversion can be warm and quiet or assertive and restless. The Big Five facets page sets those out, and the ten Big Five aspects covers the level in between.

Put plainly, each answers an ordinary question about how you usually are. Openness to Experience: How much you enjoy new ideas, art, imagination, and experiences that are different from what you already know. Conscientiousness: How organised, careful, and reliable you are about getting things done and keeping your promises. The remaining dimensions are worded the same way, as a description of a tendency rather than a verdict on a person.

What does OCEAN stand for?

OCEAN is a mnemonic for the five, in this order: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. CANOE is the same five initials rearranged, used by writers who find the word easier to say. Neither is a theory, and neither implies an order of importance.

One wrinkle is worth knowing before you compare two results. Neuroticism is the only one of the five named for its negative pole, so a high Neuroticism score means more worry and faster upset, not more calm. Many reports turn it the other way up and call it Emotional Stability, so that higher always means more of the quality in the name. If two tests disagree about your fifth score, check which direction each one is reporting.

What does each trait look like, high and low?

The sixth row is not part of the Big Five as usually taught. Lexical studies in several languages find a sixth broad factor, Honesty-Humility, that the five-factor solution folds into Agreeableness, and the HEXACO model separates it out (Ashton & Lee, 2007). It carries information about fairness and modesty that the five alone blur. For what each position looks like in an ordinary week, examples of the Big Five in daily life works through them one at a time.

Where did the Big Five come from?

The starting point was the lexical hypothesis: the idea that differences between people that matter enough to notice get written into everyday language, so the structure of trait words should reveal the structure of traits. Researchers took the trait adjectives out of the dictionary, asked large samples to rate themselves and others on them, and looked at which words moved together. Five broad clusters kept appearing, across samples, rating formats and word lists (Goldberg, 1990). A review of the field described the same five as the point the evidence had converged on (Digman, 1990), and the taxonomy was later set out in full, with its disputes, by John and Srivastava (1999). The personality traits list sorts those everyday trait words into the dimensions they load on.

A second line of work arrived at the five from the other direction. Questionnaire researchers built scales for traits they already had reason to measure and found the same structure underneath, most visibly in the NEO inventories, which measure five domains with six facets each (Costa & McCrae, 1992). When self-reports, ratings by people who know you, and different instruments all point at the same five dimensions, the structure is unlikely to be an artefact of one method (McCrae & Costa, 1987). Observer ratings gathered in fifty cultures reproduced it again (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005).

This is why the model is described as discovered rather than designed. Nobody sat down and decided there should be five (Goldberg, 1993).

Why traits and not types?

A type says you are one of a set of kinds: an introvert or an extravert, a planner or an improviser. A trait says where you sit on a continuum that everybody is on. The data support the second picture. Scores on each of the five spread out smoothly, with most people in the middle, and there is no gap where a boundary between kinds could sit.

• Types throw away information. Rounding a score to one side of a line treats someone just above it and someone far above it as the same person, and someone just below as the opposite.
• Types are unstable near the middle. Because most people score near the middle, a small change moves them across the line, and the four-letter formula that results supports fewer inferences than the people using it tend to assume (Pittenger, 2005).
• Traits keep the degree. A percentile tells you how far from average you are, which is the part that carries the information.

How is the Big Five measured?

With self-report questionnaires, almost always. You rate short statements for how accurately each describes you, several for each trait, and each trait score is the average. Several items per trait is the point: reliability rises with the number of items, and very short scales lose predictive accuracy in ways their brevity hides (Credé et al., 2012). Good inventories also include reverse-keyed statements, so that agreeing with everything does not push every score up.

• The BFI-2 measures the five domains and fifteen facets in a hierarchical model, validated against both self-reports and peer reports (Soto & John, 2017).
• The NEO inventories measure the five domains and thirty facets, and are the instruments most of the older facet literature is built on (Costa & McCrae, 1992).
• The IPIP is a public-domain pool of items anyone may use, which is why so many free online tests are built from it (Goldberg et al., 2006). The IPIP-NEO-120 measures all thirty facets with four items each, with acceptable reliability in two large internet samples (Johnson, 2014).

A raw average is meaningless on its own, so scores are placed against a reference sample and reported as a percentile: the share of that sample scoring below you. Which sample it was matters, and an honest report tells you. The Big Five personality test covers how to take one and how to read what comes back.

What do the Big Five predict?

Enough to be useful, less than a horoscope would promise. Across large longitudinal studies, personality traits predicted mortality, divorce and occupational attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and measured intelligence (Roberts et al., 2007). A broad review maps those associations across individual, interpersonal and social-institutional outcomes (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006), and a preregistered replication project found 87 percent of 78 published trait-outcome links coming out in the expected direction on retest, at about 77 percent of their original size (Soto, 2019).

• Work. Conscientiousness predicts job performance across occupational groups (Barrick & Mount, 1991), and Extraversion predicts who emerges as a leader (Judge et al., 2002). More in the Big Five and your career.
• Relationships. A person's Neuroticism is the strongest personality correlate of their partner's relationship satisfaction (r = -.22) (Malouff et al., 2010). More in the Big Five and relationships.
• Well-being. Personality accounts for as much as 39 percent of the variance in subjective well-being once different scales are analysed separately, several times the earlier estimates (Steel et al., 2008). More in the Big Five and happiness.

These are averages over many people, not forecasts about you. A trait that predicts an outcome strongly by the standards of psychology still leaves most of the variation unexplained.

What do people get wrong about the Big Five?

• That a high score is better. None of the five is a virtue. High Conscientiousness helps with long projects and can shade into rigidity. Low Agreeableness is uncomfortable in a friendship and useful in a negotiation. Each position has a cost and an advantage.
• That the middle means nothing. Most people score in the middle of most traits, and a middling score is a real result: it usually means you go both ways depending on the situation.
• That it explains you. The Big Five describes how differences between people are organised. It does not say why you are where you are, what you want, or what your history was. What is personality takes up the wider question.
• That it is fixed for life. Rank order is stable and becomes more so with age (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000), and about forty percent of the variation is heritable (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). Average levels still shift across adulthood, toward more Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability mostly between twenty and forty, with Agreeableness changing mainly in old age (Roberts et al., 2006). See can personality change, is personality genetic and how personality changes with age.

How does Wellington measure the Big Five?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, about 7 minutes, covering six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. Each statement is rated from "Very inaccurate" to "Very accurate", and reverse-keyed items are flipped. Each dimension score is the average of its statements, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Our norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the report says so. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. You answer the first ten questions before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. No card.

In the written report, every trait has three pages, one per band, written in advance by our writing and psychology team, and your answers choose which one you read. The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait (336 questions across 4 chapters, about 36 minutes) to reach 90 traits, including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, with a growth plan and a downloadable PDF. It also carries a short weekly module toward all 255 traits, with retests in year two. Read the methodology for how the scores are built. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

What are the Big Five personality traits in simple terms?

Five broad tendencies that everyone has to some degree: how open you are to new ideas, how organised and dependable you are, how much energy you draw from people, how warm and cooperative you are, and how strongly difficult feelings arrive and how quickly they pass. A result gives you a position on each, not a label.

Is there a sixth Big Five trait?

Not within the Big Five, but the HEXACO model adds one. Lexical studies in several languages find a sixth broad factor, Honesty-Humility, covering sincerity, fairness, modesty and the absence of greed. The five-factor solution spreads that content across Agreeableness, where it is easy to miss. Wellington measures it as a sixth dimension.

What is a good score on the Big Five?

There is no good score. Each dimension has real costs and real advantages at both ends, and the research links high and low positions to different outcomes rather than to better and worse lives. The useful question is whether where you sit fits the life you currently have.

Are the Big Five the same as the sixteen personality types?

No. Type systems sort people into categories, while the Big Five reports degree on five continuous dimensions. The best-known type scales do relate to four of the five, so the vocabularies overlap, but a four-letter formula supports fewer inferences than its users usually draw from it (Pittenger, 2005).