The Five-Factor Model of personality traits: consensus and controversy
There is little doubt that the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits (the ‘Big Five’) is currently the dominant paradigm in personality research, and one of the most influentialmodels in all of psychology.Digman’s 1990 reviewon the topic has become the most highly cited article in the history of the Annual Review of Psychology,with over 1,200 citations. Barrick and Mount’s 1991 meta-analysis of job performance and the FFM – itself cited over 900 times – brought personality back into the mainstream of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. The FFM has led to novel and compelling reformulations of the personality disorders that stand a fair chance of reshaping Axis II in the DSM-V (Widiger and Trull 2007). Cross-cultural collaborations have shown the universality of the FFM and demonstrated pervasive fallacies
in national character stereotypes (Terracciano, Abdel-Khalak, Ádám et al. 2005). Social psychologist Harry Reis (personal communication, 24 April 2006) recently characterized the FFM as ‘the most scientifically rigorous taxonomy that behavioural science has’, and for his research on the FFM, Paul Costa was selected by the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association to present the 2004 Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Contributions towards Unifying Psychology. What is it that researchers from so many disciplines have come to appreciate? As Digman and Inouye (1986) put it, ‘If a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors’ (p. 116). In other words, these five factors provide a structure in which most personality traits can be classified. This structure arises because traits co-vary. For example, people who are sociable and assertive tend also to be cheerful and energetic; they are high on the Extraversion (E) factor, which is said to be defined by sociability, assertiveness, cheerfulness and energy. However, people who are sociable and assertive may or may not be intellectually curious and imaginative. Those traits define a
separate factor, Openness to Experience (O). Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability (N), Agreeableness versus Antagonism (A), and Conscientiousness (C) are the remaining factors. There is a widespread consensus that these five factors are necessary and moreor-less sufficient to account for the co-variation of most personality traits, and it is Robert R.McCrae receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program, NIH, National Institute on Aging. 148this comprehensiveness that chiefly accounts for the utility of the FFM. Researchers who wish to conduct a review of the literature on personality correlates typically find that many different scales and instruments have been used to assess personality. If each is assigned to one of the five factors, their esults can be meaningfully combined. Again, the FFM provides a framework for systematic exploratory research. Suppose, for example, one wished to study the effects on personality of growing up in East versus West Germany (Angleitner and Ostendorf 2000). One might hypothesize that East Germans would be, say, higher
in C and lower in O, and administer only measures of those two factors. But if the real differences turned out to be in levels of N and A, such a design would not reveal it. By administering measures of the full FFM one can be sure that important traits have not been overlooked.
Robert R. McCrae
There is little doubt that the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits (the ‘Big Five’) is currently the dominant paradigm in personality research, and one of the most influentialmodels in all of psychology.Digman’s 1990 reviewon the topic has become the most highly cited article in the history of the Annual Review of Psychology,with over 1,200 citations. Barrick and Mount’s 1991 meta-analysis of job performance and the FFM – itself cited over 900 times – brought personality back into the mainstream of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. The FFM has led to novel and compelling reformulations of the personality disorders that stand a fair chance of reshaping Axis II in the DSM-V (Widiger and Trull 2007). Cross-cultural collaborations have shown the universality of the FFM and demonstrated pervasive fallacies
in national character stereotypes (Terracciano, Abdel-Khalak, Ádám et al. 2005). Social psychologist Harry Reis (personal communication, 24 April 2006) recently characterized the FFM as ‘the most scientifically rigorous taxonomy that behavioural science has’, and for his research on the FFM, Paul Costa was selected by the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association to present the 2004 Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Contributions towards Unifying Psychology. What is it that researchers from so many disciplines have come to appreciate? As Digman and Inouye (1986) put it, ‘If a large number of rating scales is used and if the scope of the scales is very broad, the domain of personality descriptors is almost completely accounted for by five robust factors’ (p. 116). In other words, these five factors provide a structure in which most personality traits can be classified. This structure arises because traits co-vary. For example, people who are sociable and assertive tend also to be cheerful and energetic; they are high on the Extraversion (E) factor, which is said to be defined by sociability, assertiveness, cheerfulness and energy. However, people who are sociable and assertive may or may not be intellectually curious and imaginative. Those traits define a
separate factor, Openness to Experience (O). Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability (N), Agreeableness versus Antagonism (A), and Conscientiousness (C) are the remaining factors. There is a widespread consensus that these five factors are necessary and moreor-less sufficient to account for the co-variation of most personality traits, and it is Robert R.McCrae receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program, NIH, National Institute on Aging. 148this comprehensiveness that chiefly accounts for the utility of the FFM. Researchers who wish to conduct a review of the literature on personality correlates typically find that many different scales and instruments have been used to assess personality. If each is assigned to one of the five factors, their esults can be meaningfully combined. Again, the FFM provides a framework for systematic exploratory research. Suppose, for example, one wished to study the effects on personality of growing up in East versus West Germany (Angleitner and Ostendorf 2000). One might hypothesize that East Germans would be, say, higher
in C and lower in O, and administer only measures of those two factors. But if the real differences turned out to be in levels of N and A, such a design would not reveal it. By administering measures of the full FFM one can be sure that important traits have not been overlooked.
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