What is Cooperation?

What does cooperation mean as a personality facet?

Cooperation is how much you prefer to go along and get along rather than argue, compete, or push back. How readily you set down your own position to keep the peace, and how much friction you are willing to hold. In ordinary use the word covers any joint effort, including one full of argument: a committee that fights its way to a good decision has cooperated. The personality facet means something narrower. It is about what happens when your preference and someone else's collide, and whether you would rather concede or contest.

That is why the commercial original calls the same scale Compliance (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The items ask about yielding, deferring and disliking open conflict, versus a readiness to compete and contradict. High scorers are not necessarily better teammates: a group in which nobody contests anything agrees quickly, and sometimes agrees to something poor.

Two things this facet is not. It is not agreeing with people, because a high scorer can think you are entirely wrong and still not pursue it. And it is not warmth: plenty of warm people argue hard, and plenty of cool, distant people avoid conflict in every direction.

Which personality dimension is cooperation part of?

Cooperation sits beneath Agreeableness, the Big Five dimension describing how you handle other people. Facet scores add prediction the domain score alone misses, which is why modern inventories report both levels (Soto & John, 2017). The whole list is on the facets page.

In the NEO inventories it is the fourth of the six Agreeableness facets, under the heading Compliance (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The public-domain item pool that most open Big Five inventories draw on carries the matching scale as Cooperation, which is the heading most free reports show (Goldberg et al., 2006). Related content also turns up at an intermediate level, where Agreeableness splits into compassion and politeness, the second of which is about restraining pushy impulses (DeYoung et al., 2007).

The HEXACO model keeps this content firmly in Agreeableness. Its version of the dimension is built around patience, forgiveness and gentleness, while sincerity and fairness move out into a sixth factor, Honesty-Humility (Ashton et al., 2014).

How is cooperation different from the other Agreeableness facets?

Its neighbours are easy to blur together in a summary and easy to tell apart in a meeting. Each answers a different question.

The pairing worth understanding is cooperation and politeness. Politeness is manner, cooperation is position. Someone high on politeness and low on cooperation is courteous, calm and completely immovable, a familiar type in negotiation. The reverse is the person who grumbles loudly and then does what was asked anyway. Altruism costs you time rather than ground.

What does high cooperation look like?

High scorers find friction genuinely unpleasant, so they work to end it. They look for the third option, absorb a small unfairness rather than make a scene, apologise early to reset the temperature, and say yes to a plan they privately think is second best.

• Where it helps. Long-running teams, families, service and care work, partnerships where the relationship outlasts any single decision, and any group that would otherwise seize up over small disputes.
• What it costs. Necessary conflict gets postponed rather than avoided. Preferences go unstated until resentment has built up behind them. In negotiation, high scorers tend to under-ask, and the concessions add up before anyone notices.

The skill for a high scorer is raising a disagreement early, while it is still small and cheap.

What does low cooperation look like?

Low scorers hold their ground. They say the unwelcome thing, ask the awkward question, let their irritation show, and are comfortable when a decision leaves someone unhappy. This is the person a group needs when everyone else is being agreeable about a bad plan, and they tend to bargain well for themselves and for people they represent.

• Where it helps. Negotiation, review and quality control, advocacy, editing, safety work, and any role where being liked would be a conflict of interest.
• What it costs. Disputes are more frequent and take longer to close, goodwill has to be rebuilt more often, and some people stop raising things at all.

A low score is not aggression. It describes a lower weighting on harmony when harmony and candour pull apart, a preference rather than a temper.

What does the research say?

The clearest evidence sits at the level of the whole dimension rather than this one facet, and it is better to say so than to dress a domain result as a facet finding.

• Relationships. A meta-analysis of intimate partners found that a person's higher Agreeableness went with greater relationship satisfaction in their partner (Malouff et al., 2010).
• Work. Conscientiousness predicted job performance across every occupational group and criterion studied; where the other dimensions predicted at all, the estimated true-score correlations were small, below .10 (Barrick & Mount, 1991).
• Leadership. In a review of personality and leadership, Extraversion was the strongest Big Five correlate of leadership and Agreeableness by far the weakest (Judge et al., 2002).
• Age. Mean levels of Agreeableness changed mainly in old age, while Conscientiousness and emotional stability rose earlier, mostly between 20 and 40 (Roberts et al., 2006).

Treat these as averages across many people rather than forecasts about you. A facet measured with a handful of statements is best read next to the dimension it belongs to.

How does Wellington measure cooperation?

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, takes about 7 minutes and scores six dimensions, the Big Five and Honesty-Humility, so it gives you Agreeableness as a whole rather than cooperation on its own. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card.

Cooperation itself arrives with the membership, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters and about 36 minutes, to reach 90 traits including every Big Five facet. 5 statements measure cooperation. Each is rated on a five-point accuracy scale and averaged, and the average is placed against a reference sample as a percentile, then reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. The norms behind those percentiles are provisional until the norming sample is complete. 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.

Every band has its own written page, prepared in advance by the writing and psychology team, and your answers choose which one you read. For cooperation the three are The Sparring Partner for the Quiet band (You would rather have the argument than the silence.), The Even Hand for the Balanced band (You pick your battles, and you mostly pick well.), and The Peacekeeper for the High band (You would rather find the third way than win the argument.). None of the three is the good one.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds a short weekly module across 104 weeks toward all 255 traits. How the scores are built is set out in the methodology. 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 built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Can cooperation change?

Somewhat, and slowly. A systematic review of intervention studies found trait measures shifted during interventions by about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and the changes held at follow-up (Roberts et al., 2017). Wanting to change was followed by measured change over sixteen weeks, and specific if-then plans helped more than general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is high cooperation the same as being a pushover?

No. The facet measures how much weight you give to ending friction, not whether you can hold a line. Many high scorers are firm about limits and warm inside them. Conflict is more uncomfortable for them, so the limits usually have to be set deliberately rather than by instinct.

Why is this facet called Compliance in some reports?

Because that is the name the NEO inventories gave the scale (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Open inventories built from the public-domain item pool call the same content Cooperation, which is the heading most free reports show (Goldberg et al., 2006). The two names describe one construct: a tendency to defer and accommodate rather than compete and contradict.

Does low cooperation hurt your career?

Not straightforwardly. Conscientiousness predicted job performance across every occupational group and criterion studied; where the other dimensions predicted at all, the estimated true-score correlations were small, below .10 (Barrick & Mount, 1991). In a review of leadership, Agreeableness was the weakest Big Five correlate of leadership, close to zero (Judge et al., 2002).