The Big 5 Personality Traits
Personality quizzes are often fun, insightful, revealing, and intimidating. We take them because we seek to understand ourselves further. They often showcase our strengths and our weaknesses.
Perhaps the most popular personality quiz publicly available, and you could take online through a simple Google search, is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test is as interesting as it is fun; however, it is not considered reliable (meaning that it does not yield consistent results when retaken) or valid (it does not measure what it purports to measure). Often the conditions of taking this test impact the results that you receive. For example, fluctuations in job setting, mood, etc., will yield different results.
A more commonly accepted index for measuring personality for reasons of validity and reliability is the Big 5. These personality traits are cross-cultural, meaning you will likely find the occurrence of each trait regardless of a person's cultural background.
An easy way to remember what the Big 5 measures is by using the acronym OCEAN, which stands for openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In this article, I break down each personality trait to assist you with placing yourself on the scale.
Openness to experience is about as self-referential as it sounds. Those who are higher in openness to experience tend to be more adventurous and willing to take risks than those who rate lower in this domain. Being high in openness to experience is also correlated with being more politically liberal, higher in creative thinking/output, and higher IQ scores (primarily due to interest in novel ideas and intellectual pursuit).
Granted, being high in openness to experience can have its pitfalls, such as excessive substance abuse and riskier sexual behaviors. Those who are lower in openness to experience tend to view themselves as more pragmatic and more willing to persevere through a challenging situation than move on to something different. They are likely to view themselves as being more politically conservative and tend to value tradition and ritual.
Conscientiousness has to do with striving to do your work with intentionality and thoroughness so that you can yield positive results. Generally, if you are high in conscientiousness, you are methodical, focused on being in control, orderly, engage in goal-directed behaviors, and are future-oriented.
Those who are lower in conscientiousness tend to be less organized and more spontaneous. Common complaints surrounding conscientious people are that they are stubborn and rigid, and those who are less conscientious are accused of being chaotic and disorganized.
Next in the OCEAN acronym is extroversion. Extroverted people are more likely to feel energized by social situations than those who lie at the opposite end of the spectrum, the introverts. Extroverts often outwardly appear as being more dominant, particularly in group settings; however, they can lack significant depth in their relationships.
Introverts do not engage socially as much as extroverts and are often characterized as feeling tired or exhausted after participating in one-on-one or group settings. Introverts may seem shy or potentially depressed; this is not always the case; in fact, they are likely to achieve greater depth in their relationships than their extroverted counterpart. Much like the other personality traits, most people are not entirely extroverted or vice versa. Most will predominantly be one more than the other, and situational shifts (e.g., loves going to clubs but dislikes attending weddings) are to be expected.
Agreeableness is about one's desire for social harmony. Agreeable people are often liked by the masses due to their ability to bridge gaps among diverse groups and are generally seen as reliable and trustworthy.
On the opposite end are those who are more disagreeable. If you're low in agreeableness, you are more likely to be skeptical about others' motives, competitive, and unwilling to go with the flow, particularly if you notice that things don't align with your beliefs or values.
Agreeable people generally run into trouble because they may go too much with the flow and find themselves in regrettable scenarios, building resentment toward someone else instead of seeing themselves as the primary reason they are in that particular situation. Disagreeable people likely won't fall into this trap as they are the ones who are thinking outside of the box; however, always being the devil's advocate can put one in situations that are undesirable as well. Argument for argument's sake can be a slippery slope and is generally seen as defensiveness.
Neuroticism, or emotional instability, is a person's likelihood that they will experience feelings like anxiety, anger, and depression. Those who are higher in neuroticism generally have a low tolerance for stressful events and vice versa.
Being too high in neuroticism adds a level of fragility to every moment. The world is often viewed as a dark and dangerous place. Being low in neuroticism doesn't necessarily mean that you experience happiness all of the time, though; it just means that the occurrence of negative emotion is rarer.
Understanding your personality in these domains can be quite valuable as it allows you to understand yourself better and can assist you in understanding how you view others. While there are undoubtedly genetic predispositions toward the development of personality, there are environmental circumstances as well.
Scoring higher or lower in an area can be validating, or it can be terrifying. Regardless, you can work on shifting certain traits, arduous as it may be, through understanding your life in the present, what you would like to be your ideal future self, and understanding and reconciling with how the past has modeled you into the person you are today.
References
Rantanen J, et al. (2007). Long-term stability in the Big Five personality traits in adulthood. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2007.00609.x
Raypole, C. (2018, October 23). What the Big Five Personality Traits Can Tell You. Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health/big-five-personality-traits