[1] These five personality traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience have garnered widespread support [dubious – discuss].
The authors also cite previous research suggesting two factor solutions subsumed by each of the Big Five personality Traits.
This scale is based on a "top-down approach" in which traits are viewed as broad themes that occur in personality measures.
In contrast to purely hierarchical models which seek to break Big Five personality traits into aspects and facets which exist within each domain, the circumplex approach views personality characteristics as existing in multidimensional space, each dimension being represented by one of the big five domains.
Rather than representing personality characteristics in a full five dimensions, they partition this space into "subsets" which are the 10 two domain combinations that can be formed by the Big Five.
[8] The justification for circumplex models, which are characterized by the "multidimensional" approach mentioned above, is that they are better able to identify clusters of semantically related characteristics.
[7] Although the Big Five model covers a broader range of personality trait space, it is less able to make these sorts of distinctions.
[9] Here agency refers to "strivings for mastery, power, self-assertion, and self-expansion" and communion to "the urge toward community and the relinquishing of individuality".
[9] Colin DeYoung and colleagues have suggested that the Alpha and Beta factors might be better interpreted as "stability" and "plasticity".
The higher order factor stability expresses a person's general ability to maintain stable relationships, motivation and emotional states respectively.
[13] These underlying biological correlates combined with DeYoung's conceptual arguments form the foundation of his case for "stability" and "plasticity" as labels and interpretations of Digman's Alpha and Beta factors.
"[18] A 2010 meta-analysis of 144,117 participants found that "GFP has a substantive component as it is related to supervisor-rated job performance."
[17] This work has indicated that there may be an underlying genetic component for Musek's blend of all socially desirable personality dimensions.
Rushton conjectured that this highest-level personality dimension represents human evolutionary development toward "more efficient persons—those who are more level-headed, agreeable, friendly, dependable, and open.
Costa and McCrae pointed out that in an analysis of three different personality scales designed to assess five factor model traits, Digman's two-factor solution could not be replicated across these instruments.
[26][27][28] For example, Muncer[26] critiqued the study by Rushton and Irwing[16] that had claimed to find a general factor of personality based on a new analysis of Digman's data.
Muncer argued that Rushton and Irwing's meta-analysis was unreliable due to heterogeneous correlations between the Big Five factors analysed.
Furthermore, there is a lack of evidence that high levels of a general factor of personality would necessarily confer reproductive advantages.
[26] Proponents of the GFP like Rushton would likely object to this by pointing at recent discontinuities in the human fitness landscape in particular.