Big Five Personality Tests

Currently, the dominant model of personality research suggests that five main personality traits explain most individual differences; extraversion, neuroticism (or emotional stability), agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. These five factors are called the big five, a term used to describe their broadness, not their greatness.

The big five were identified based on the lexical hypothesis, which suggested that as we are social creatures, the most important ways in which people were different would have had words invented for them. If someone is a cruel versus a kind person, it’s important for you to be able to describe them to your friend so your friend knows what to expect. Large numbers of personality-type words were then gathered from the dictionary, and underwent a statistical technique called factor analysis in order to find out which words clumped together-for instance, friendly, kind, and nice, are all similar words. The result was the big five.