Big Five personality traits

[10][11][12][13][14] The initial model was advanced in 1958 by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, research psychologists at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, but failed to reach scholars and scientists until the 1980s.

[43] In the same year, Cattell, with Maurice Tatsuoka and Herbert Eber, found 4 additional factors, which they believed consisted of information that could only be provided through self-rating.

In 1978, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae of the National Institutes of Health published a book chapter describing their Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness (NEO) model.

Also in 1978, British psychologist Peter Saville of Brunel University applied statistical analysis to 16PF results, and determined that the model could be reduced to five factors, "Anxiety", "Extraversion", "Warmth", "Imagination" and "Conscientiousness".

Wim Hofstee at the University of Groningen used a lexical hypothesis approach with the Dutch language to develop what became the International Personality Item Pool in the 1990s.

[89] Generally, people are a combination of extraversion and introversion, with personality psychologist Hans Eysenck suggesting a model by which differences in their brains produce these traits.

In a study conducted among 169 participants in leadership positions in a variety of professions, individuals were asked to take a personality test and be directly evaluated by supervised subordinates.

[104][105] Some believe that early childhood temperaments may become adolescent and adult personality traits as individuals' basic genetic characteristics interact with their changing environments to various degrees.

[118] Research on the Big Five, and personality in general, has focused primarily on individual differences in adulthood, rather than in childhood and adolescence, and often include temperament traits.

[104][106][128][129] More specifically, research suggests that four of the Big Five – namely Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness – reliably describe personality differences in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Someone is therefore not simply on one end of each trait dichotomy but is a blend of both, exhibiting some characteristics more often than others:[152] Research regarding personality with growing age has suggested that as individuals enter their elder years (79–86), those with lower IQ see a raise in extraversion, but a decline in conscientiousness and physical well-being.

In 2002, the Journal of Psychology posted a Big Five Personality Trait Difference; where researchers explored the relationship between the five-factor model and the Universal-Diverse Orientation (UDO) in counselor trainees.

[169] Recent work has found relationships between Geert Hofstede's cultural factors, Individualism, Power Distance, Masculinity, and Uncertainty Avoidance, with the average Big Five scores in a country.

[170] For instance, the degree to which a country values individualism correlates with its average extraversion, whereas people living in cultures which are accepting of large inequalities in their power structures tend to score somewhat higher on conscientiousness.

Countries with higher average trait Openness tended to have more democratic institutions, an association that held even after factoring out other relevant influences such as economic development.

[176] A study published in 2023 found that the Big Five personality traits may also influence the quality of life experienced by people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, post diagnosis.

[178] Since that time, quite a number of additional studies have expanded on this research base and provided further empirical support for understanding the DSM personality disorders in terms of the FFM domains.

[194] A meta-analysis of 59 longitudinal studies showed that high neuroticism predicted the development of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, psychosis, schizophrenia, and non-specific mental distress, also after adjustment for baseline symptoms and psychiatric history.

These results indicate that intellectual curiosity significantly enhances academic performance if students combine their scholarly interest with thoughtful information processing.

Studies conducted on college students have concluded that hope, which is linked to agreeableness,[209] conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness,[209] has a positive effect on psychological well-being.

[207] In 2008, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) commissioned a report that concludes that no significant evidence exists that learning-style assessments should be included in the education system.

These latter results suggest that being intellectually curious fully enhances academic performance when students combine this scholarly interest with thoughtful information processing.

The results generally show that individuals who are organized, planned, determined, who are oriented to new ideas and independent thinking have increased success in distance education environments.

[221] For instance, software programmers and scientists often rank high on Openness to experience and tend to be intellectually curious, think in symbols and abstractions, and find repetition boring.

The estimated levels of an individual's success in jobs that require public speaking versus one-on-one interactions will differ according to whether that person has particular traits' facets.

However, later work demonstrated that the correlations obtained by psychometric personality researchers were actually very respectable by comparative standards,[227] and that the economic value of even incremental increases in prediction accuracy was exceptionally large, given the vast difference in performance by those who occupy complex job positions.

However this personality trait is associated with reduced adaptability, lower learning in initial stages of skill acquisition and more interpersonally abrasiveness, when also low in agreeableness.

[67]: 431–33 [111] Measures of the Big Five constructs appear to show some consistency in interviews, self-descriptions and observations, and this static five-factor structure seems to be found across a wide range of participants of different ages and cultures.

Big Five proponents have responded that although other solutions may be viable in a single data set, only the five-factor structure consistently replicates across different studies.

[7] Moreover, the factor analysis that this model is based on is a linear method incapable of capturing nonlinear, feedback and contingent relationships between core systems of individual differences.