What is the Big Five? The five-factor model of personality

Where does the model come from?

The Big Five grew out of language. The idea is simple: if people differ strongly in some way, they will have invented words for it. So researchers collected the adjectives people use to describe one another, such as helpful, messy, talkative and curious. They then asked large groups of people to rate themselves and others on those words, and looked at which words go together. People who call themselves talkative often also call themselves sociable and outspoken.

Again and again, that produced five large groups. In a well-known series of studies, the American psychologist Lewis Goldberg found the same five factors in large collections of English trait words. They appeared with different statistical methods, and both when people described themselves and when others described them ^[1]. This way of working is called the lexical approach: language as a record of what people find important about each other.

The structure later held up outside English too. When questionnaires were translated into German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, among others, the same five traits broadly reappeared ^[2]. That does not make the Big Five a law of nature, but it does make it a remarkably sturdy description of how people differ.

The five traits at a glance

Every trait has two sides, and both are equally valuable. Here is what each trait describes and how its two sides can show up in daily life.

• Openness is about curiosity, imagination and an appetite for new ideas and experiences. Higher up, you look for variety and fresh angles and get absorbed by the unfamiliar. Lower down, you prefer the tried and tested, and you think in practical, concrete terms.
• Conscientiousness is about planning, organisation and persistence towards goals. Higher up, you like to work to a plan and finish what you start. Lower down, you stay flexible, adapt easily when plans change and soon find a fixed schedule too tight.
• Extraversion is about energy from social contact, activity and stimulation. Higher up, people and a lively setting give you energy and you seek others out. Lower down, quiet and focused work recharge you, and you would rather have a good conversation with a few people than a crowded room.
• Agreeableness is about warmth, cooperation and consideration for others. Higher up, you pay close attention to how others feel and help easily. Lower down, you say what you think, look at what is true or what works, and are not easily talked round.
• Emotional stability is about calm under pressure and recovery from setbacks. Many tests measure the opposite end and call it neuroticism; DepthFive always describes the trait from the stable side. Higher up, your mood changes slowly and you stay calm when things get tense. Lower down, you feel things strongly and quickly notice when something shifts or is off.

A scale, not a box

The Big Five does not sort people into groups; it places them on five scales. There is no line where someone suddenly becomes "an extravert". Most people sit somewhere between the ends, and many sit close to the middle.

That is not a choice made for convenience. It is what the research shows. A review of 102 studies that looked for genuine personality types, groups of people clearly separated from one another, concluded that such types are extremely rare or do not exist at all ^[3]. Personality varies gradually, like height: there are not two kinds of people called tall and short, just one continuous range.

For you, that means two people scoring 45 and 55 are more alike than the labels introvert and extravert suggest. That is why DepthFive calls a score from 40 to 60 "just above the middle" or "just below the middle". You will recognise something of both sides.

How does a test measure the Big Five?

A Big Five test asks how well short statements about behaviour and feelings describe you. A statement might be about how easily you start a conversation with strangers, or how quickly you put your things away. You answer on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, describing how you generally are now.

For each trait, your answers add up to a raw score. On its own that says little: an average answer of 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 5 might be high or perfectly ordinary, depending on how other people answer. So a good test compares your score with a norm group, a large group of people who answered the same questions. The result is a percentile. A 70 means you score higher than about 70 out of 100 people in that group. How that works, and why the group matters, is explained in percentiles and norm groups.

Two things are worth keeping in mind. A test measures self-description: how you see yourself, not a hidden core beneath the surface. And more questions give a more precise picture, because chance answers average out better.

What does the Big Five say about your life?

The Big Five mainly describes how you usually are: where your energy comes from, how you handle plans, how you respond to other people. Across groups of people, the traits are also linked to all sorts of life outcomes. Researchers wanted to know whether those links are real or a fluke. A large replication project tested 78 previously reported links again. About 87 percent held up, although the links were on average somewhat weaker than in the original studies ^[4].

Those are findings about groups. They show that the five traits mean something, but they say nothing certain about any one person. Your profile describes where your centre of gravity lies; what you do with it is up to you.

The Big Five at DepthFive

DepthFive measures the five traits with a free test of 20 questions, with no email or account needed. You see five percentiles compared with more than 100,000 people, a second comparison with people of your own age and gender if you fill those in, and a Depth Pattern: a short summary of your profile, not a type. If you want a more precise picture, a one-time payment of €25 ($25, or £22 in the UK) lets you answer the remaining 100 questions and get a personal report based on all 120. You can start straight away with the free test.