Beyond the Dataset

Deep dive into the depths of the Big Five Personality Test (and not the results that come with it).

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Definitions

When discussing the Big Five, several bits of terminology need to be understood:

Trait: “Person’s typical style of thinking, feeling, and acting in different kinds of situations and at different times”.1 Traits can be used to predict certain behaviors.

Personality: “Pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior.”2 They’re acquired through life experiences and are relatively stable.

Temperament: “Physical, mental, and emotional traits people are born with.”3

Many consider temperament as a subset of personality.4 However, temperament is considered to have a separate model called the CBQ (Children’s Behavior Questionnaire) with the following three traits:

Notice the overlap between CBQ and Big Five - we’re only missing openness and agreeableness. Despite the similarities, we will not be separating personality and temperament, as the Big Five aims to cover personality traits while integrating temperament into the mix.

I’m also going to clarify the definition of extraversion. The Big Five uses Eysenck’s concept of extraversion rather than Jung’s.

Eysenck: Extraverts gain and recharge their mental energy from external stimuli, such as social interaction. Introverts prefer to shield themselves from external stimuli and recharge their mental energy by withdrawing and being alone.5

Jung: Extraverts seek action and sensory input from the external world, using their experiences to influence their thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Introverts immerse themselves in their internal environment (the self) through reflection, dreaming, and keeping their ‘head in the clouds’ to influence their thoughts, beliefs, and actions.6

This clarification may be redundant – many people have only heard of Eysenck’s version of extraversion. However, I still find value in acknowledging Jung, especially because Eysenck built his definition off of Jung’s.

Origins

“Can you find a taxonomy to describe human personality?”

That’s the idea that started the Big Five Personality Test.7 After all, humans were greedy for more, desperate to understand human personality, and longed to map it out qualitatively.

Since the 1880s, scientists have been interested in personality. But, it only became official in 1936 when Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert conducted the first personality study. They gathered 18000 personality-describing words from the Webster’s Dictionary, then narrowed it down to 4504 adjectives to describe non-physical characteristics. This created the first ‘personality word bank’ – a ‘comprehensive’ way to describe personality.

Through the work of Cattell, Tupes and Christal, Fiske, Norman, Smith, McCrae, and Costa8, and many others, the test has undergone several revisions, expansions, and improvements. However, the purpose and the ideas within the test remains the same.9

Strengths

There are a lot of reasons why the Big Five is such a popular test and remains at the forefront of personality research.

  1. The traits the Big Five measures are relatively stable during adulthood.

As we grow older, our traits are going to naturally develop and change. For example, you tend to have higher conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism, extraversion, and openness. This is mainly because people tend to have more responsibilities (i.e. family, job, etc.) as they age and eventually learn to build traits to adapt. This is called the maturation effect.10

After adolescence, people’s traits tend to stabilize, resulting there are distinct behavior patterns to analyze. This consistency (leading to replicability) is desirable for scientists.

  1. Widely accepted by the scientific community

Many scientists have conducted studies to confirm the validity and reliability of the Big Five Personality Test. This includes Krueger and Eaton (2010), Kamarulzaman and Nordin (2012), and Satow (2021). Using confirmatory factor analysis, invariance analysis, and various other empirical tests, studies have shown that the Big Five test can account for “80% of personality variance”11 and is most widely accepted test within this niche.

  1. Very easily repeatable

Scientists value repeatability. Got a fascinating result? Make sure to conduct the experiment 2 more times, just in case something is off!

The Big Five test is generally delivered as a 50-question Likert scale test. It can easily be printed and distributed to thousands of participants, ensuring consistency between studies.

  1. Simplicity and Generalization

As a result of constantly improving the Big Five personality test, the traits we’ve selected are:

  1. Easy to understand and specific - In English, these traits are clearly defined and simple.
  2. Mutually exclusive - Makes it easy to quantify.
  3. Generalizable - These traits are universal and can generally apply to any culture.

Together, these strengths make the Big Five the default when considering personality.

Limitations

Despite the rigorous tests to check the Big Five’s reliability and validity and general acceptance within the scientific community, there are various criticisms of the model.

Lexical Hypothesis

One of the biggest criticisms of the Big Five test is its basis of lexical hypothesis. Lexical hypothesis assumes that “the most important personality traits are encoded as words…. and that the analysis of [these words] may lead to a scientifically acceptable personality model”.12 Hence, by using language (or for the Big Five, a dictionary) as a resource, researchers can create a list of important personality traits to judge people off of.

People are against the lexical hypothesis for various reasons:

Verbal descriptors result in social bias (i.e. people consciously or unconsciously choose traits that align with what society deems as ‘good’. For example, people might say they’re ‘agreeable’ because society tends to favour nicer people). This can greatly skew the data because Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism become invalid traits – researchers can not ensure that people will answer honestly and objectively.13

Others also deem personality as ‘too complex’ to be encoded into a singular word or used in everyday language. We may require more detail to fully express what characteristics we want to capture, and common language may not be an adequate vessel to describe the human condition and personality. The definition of traits can also be too ambiguous as different words may represent different things to researchers versus the general population. The meaning of the word could also change over time.

The lexical hypothesis also has little scientific backing since tests to validate the lexical hypothesis are deemed ‘unscientific’ by academia.14

(In)correct Approaches

There are two approaches for the Big Five:

Etic: “Traits are universal, regardless of the environment, culture, or context”

Emic: “Traits are culture and context-specific”

Often, Big Five studies that focus on real-world application use the Etic approach and generalize their insights to encompass the entirety of the human population, instead of narrowing their scope.

The Etic (or universal) approach was led by Eysenck, as he emphasized how the Big Five traits are ‘biological’ and universal to every human language. Therefore, it would appear regardless of one’s culture or environment.15

The Emic (or local) approach believes that cultures heavily shape personality. For instance, with the test’s origins stemming from lexical hypothesis using an English dictionary, the current model favours a Western-centric view of personality traits.

Thus, the question becomes: Do you value a generalized and universal model to encompass the entire human condition? Or, do you take a more personalized approach, envisioning how one’s environment can influence their behavior?

Culture Differences

Various cultures, such as Korean, Mexican, Indian, Filipino, and Arabic, believe that there are many traits that are very important to them and only exist within their culture. Therefore, if we were to utilize the Etic approach, there may be crucial personality traits that are left out as a result of the Big Five’s Western-centric development.

This idea has been explored by Chinese researchers who replicated the origins of the Big Five test by applying the idea of lexical hypothesis to Chinese. This resulted in a completely different quiz with different traits — the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) — that was tailored for the Chinese population.16

The Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) contains four major personality factors:

  1. Social potency (leadership, divergent thinking, novelty, extraversion)
  2. Dependability (responsibility, optimism vs pessimism, face17, locus of control)
  3. Accommodation (Family orientation, self vs society, defensiveness, graciousness, logical vs affective orientation)
  4. Interpersonal relatedness (individual vs social, harmony, discipline, traditionalism vs modernity)

There is some overlap with the Big Five.

Although there are some similarities, it’s clear that the Chinese do not value the same things as Western audiences. For example, openness is not a separate category as it functions “in a complex context than a distinct construct” when compared to Western environments. Hence, it becomes embedded within other categories such as social potency (e.g. divergent thinking, novelty) and interpersonal relatedness (e.g. traditionalism).19 Furthermore, the CPAI also associates extraversion with openness - traits that tend to be more distinct for Western audiences.

Furthermore, the definition of openness can vary depending on one’s culture. Openness requires breaking free of tradition and embracing new ideas. One must be motivated by aesthetic sensitivity rather than rules — an idea that can be discouraged in Asian cultures.

It also begs the question: Is an individual’s opinion truly what they think, or were they just taught to think that? If they’re taught to think that, does that matter? Is that part of their personality or just a byproduct of their society?

Issues of the Etic approach are also found when trying to apply lexical hypothesis to the Arabic language and culture, where the studies created a completely new sixth trait: religiosity.

Religion is the (lack of) belief in a higher power. For various cultures, it’s an incredibly important aspect of their daily lives as it greatly influences their behavior, values, and beliefs as well as their sense of belonging and community.20

Higher religiosity is associated with increased agreeableness and conscientiousness and decreased neuroticism.21 It has been observed that Islamic students who are more committed to their religious teachings and consistently follow religious practices are less likely to cheat during exams and feel higher satisfaction with work, relating to conscientiousness. Higher religiosity is also positively correlated with decreased openness and increased extraversion, the link between these traits is weaker than the other 3 traits.22

Although personality is often “assumed to be the cause of religiosity” rather than a consequence, recent studies refute this point. They believe that religion is more like a two-way street, with religiosity and personality simultaneously affecting each other.23 Furthermore, With studies showing that “religiosity is a larger independent factor” than simply being a part of the other 5 traits and “represents a broad-based motivational domain of comparable breadth”, some researchers believe that its influence should be fully acknowledged by adding religiosity as a 6th trait.24

If religiosity became a trait, there are various faucets that it could encompass, such as:

However, it should be noted that the relationships between personality and religion are (relatively) small and religiousness has also been correlated with personality traits outside of the Big Five. Hence, more research needs to be done to determine whether it is completely independent27 from the other five traits and is an accurate way of measuring one’s personality.28

Sex Differences

The Big Five Personality Test results also seem to change depending on one’s sex. When collecting results in Turkey, men were “more imaginative and inquisitive” compared to women. This is likely because of the patriarchal culture within Turkey as they have very strict gender roles; men were able to pursue what they wanted while women were shoehorned into rigid and rule-abiding lifestyles. So, how each sex behaved would be heavily influenced by societal norms.29

We can also see this happen (on a smaller scale) within Western countries by analyzing the stereotypical socialization of girls and boys. In Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Poland, and Russia, men tend to be “more assertive and risk-taking than women”, hence scoring high on extraversion and openness. This is likely caused by males believing that boldness and dominance are the core of being masculine and are socialized “to be independent and autonomous”.30 Risk-taking is also seen as highly valued in our current society. We’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of every industry, whether it’s tech, cuisine, or sports —- without constant innovation and always taking risks, how could you stand out in society and prove your worth?

Women, on the other hand, were more “anxious and tender-minded” while also scoring higher in neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to feelings.31 Females are socialized to be more passive than males, are expected to be nicer, well-behaved, not talk back to people, and are encouraged to share their feelings with their friends (where being more expressive and aware of emotions can be seen as a sign of overreaction, thereby neuroticism).32 These stereotypes and expectations — even if they were not intended to influence youth — are often encouraged by parents and play a role in how children identify what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, thereby affecting how they act and what they believe.

Expanding this beyond the Western world and analyzing results from 55 different nations, the trend changes slightly: women scored higher in neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. However, men scored higher in assertiveness and openness. Neuroticism score were the most significant difference between sexes — women scored significantly higher in 49 out of the 55 nations.33

Socioeconomic factors also influenced gender differences. First, there were larger differences between men and women in healthy, rich, and gender-egalitarian cultures. This is likely because there are higher levels of human development (with better access to education, basic needs, etc.), allowing an individual’s personality to flourish with fewer constraints.

Furthermore, men in developed world regions were “less neurotic, extraverted, conscientious and agreeable, compared to men in less developed world regions”.34 This is understandable as having a lower socioeconomic status may cause you to worry more about the future and require you to work harder. Furthermore, it may encourage you to build a community of people around to, where you can ask others for help during times of need, requiring you to be more extraverted and agreeable — you need people to like you! Interestingly, women have minimal variation in their personality based on their socioeconomic status.

However, can you measure and generalize certain traits such as openness and extraversion accurately when it is actively being manipulated by cultural, societal, and evolutionary factors? Currently, studies say that you can! Various researchers have found significant differences in personalities when comparing both sexes and stating “social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations” — perhaps there really is an innate personality difference between sexes!35

Lack of Representation

Although this test samples hundreds of locations, it’s not completely representative of the population it claims to show. This is because a majority of our data comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations. Less developed areas (such as African and smaller European countries) are often glossed over and represent a tiny amount of data points.

A clear example of this lies within the data set that I’ve been analyzing. When we look at the data points on the map (to find trends between countries), it’s clear that much of Africa has been omitted from the data.36 It brings the reliability of the data set into question: can we rely on WEIRD populations to make generalizations and assume it will be correct? Are these results universally applicable?

For the Big Five, studies have shown that non-WEIRD populations do not follow the same trends as WEIRD populations. In fact, for low and middle-income countries, Big Five personality questions fail to measure the personality traits they’re built for and have low validity. This is a huge contrast to the high validity discovered in internet surveys from the same countries.37

Previously, it has been mentioned that high conscientiousness and low neuroticism are positively correlated with income. It also intuitively makes sense — if you can work hard and have good stress management, you tend to perform your job better. Yet, when analyzing non-WEIRD populations, it was seen that conscientiousness was not a predictor for increased income – only low neuroticism and high openness were. This may be an issue with the design of the test because questions attempting to gauge one’s conscientiousness were the least accurate (out of the 5 traits). However, openness questions “poorly differentiate from other items… [so,] one cannot exclude that this result is driven by systematic responses biases” and other external factors.38 One must remain cautious between correlation and causation.

There is also evidence that the Big Five personality test is not valid when surveying rural populations with low levels of education in Bolivia, Colombia, and Kenya, highlighting the Big Five’s inability to be completely universal.39

During the process of surveying non-WEIRD populations, it should also be noted that errors may have occurred due to the quality of translation (i.e. wording of questions, how they are interpreted within a specific culture) via an enumerator to adapt to respondents with lower cognitive ability. Thus, the impact of an enumerator’s face-to-face interactions with respondents should be taken into consideration.40

It was also noted that less educated populations had a lower intrinsic interest in taking the survey, as their incentives and expectations for the survey may be completely different than a respondent in a WEIRD country who is taking the Big Five test for fun.41 This could lead to skewed data.

Despite categorizing respondents (e.g. sex, countries), there still seems to be varying answers rather than a strong, general trend. Assuming that we continue to use an Etic approach, the reliability of the test could be called into question as there are inconclusive results from many studies.

Variability of Tests

The Big Five Personality Test has dozens of different versions. Some contain 44 questions, some contain 25, 50, or even 60, each containing unique questions. In non-English speaking countries, people will also have translators that could twist the meaning of the question (as seen above).

Of course, the test will always attempt to measure the respondent’s personality as there are standardized faucets within each trait (i.e. the faucet assertiveness within the trait extraversion). However, it’s possible that person 1 taking test version A with 44 questions could receive a different result than if they took test version B with 50 different questions with a translator.

Potential Improvements

In regards to the methodology of the Big Five test, various improvements could be made.

Zhang, Tse, and Savalei propose to remove the Likert scale format42 and replace it with the Expanded format. The Likert scale often falls victim to acquiescence bias — the tendency to agree with whatever a quiz question asks, rather than forming your own opinion43 — which could significantly skew test results. This has generally been removed by having an equal amount of ‘positive’ questions (e.g. I have excellent ideas.) and ‘negative’ questions (e.g. I do not try new experiences). However, just because respondents agree to an equal amount of positive and negative questions, it doesn’t mean that the data is valid. All it does is create “contradictory and uninterpretable answers”.44 Furthermore, interchanging negatively and positively worded questions, especially ones that contain negative particles like ‘not’ or ‘no’ or affixal morphemes like ‘un-‘, ‘non-‘, ‘dis-‘ or ‘-less’, can be confusing for inattentive respondents who briefly glance at the question before answering.

To solve the problems of the Likert scale, they’ve introduced the Expanded format which allows respondents to select answers in the following format:

The Expanded format reduces ambiguity by explicitly stating the meaning of every answer, removes acquiescence bias by changing the ‘agree’ to ‘disagree’ scale, and reduces confusion regarding negations by forcing respondents to pay attention to the subtle differences between responses. It also should be noted that the order effect comes into play, where people are most likely to choose an option that is first or last.45 This can affect results, especially because there are only 4 possible answers.

When conducting primary research to test these hypotheses, it was confirmed that the Expanded format reduced acquiescence bias for the conscientiousness and extraversion questions, producing more accurate results. Furthermore, by using chi-square tests to compare observed and expected results, it was shown that the Expanded format was “generally not affected by Order effect”.46

Openness questions performed mediocrely, primarily because openness Likert questions only have two ‘negatively’ worded questions out of 10 total questions — meaning that the acquiescence bias associated with openness is already quite high. Hence, the Expanded form and Likert version performed equally well.47

However, neuroticism and agreeableness questions performed worse with the Expanded version, as the order effect may have played a larger role with these two traits and made respondents’ results more inaccurate. Neuroticism and agreeableness also tend to be the “first and second most unreliable and problematic scale” as it has low retest reliability and low convergent validity.48 This highlights that agreeableness is not well-defined within the test and the agreeableness score could be affected other external factors.

DeBell, Brader, Wilson, and Jackman also conducted a study to improve the Big Five TIPI (Ten Item Personality Inventory) assessment, which contains 10 questions to measure the respondent’s Big Five score. TIPI has many advantages — it’s short, widely accepted, and widely used by researchers.49

Original TIPI test

Figure 1: Original TIPI test

However, there were 3 key issues with the current TIPI that this study aimed to improve.

  1. Response labels

The TIPI response system requires respondents to input numbers (which correspond to words), rather than use the words themselves. This seems awfully convoluted when respondents can just use words to answer in the first place.

  1. Agree-Disagree format

This results in acquiescence bias, as mentioned previously.

  1. All on one page

Since respondents see all the questions at once, they may choose to rush through the quiz to get their results instead of carefully thinking about the questions. This results in respondents satisficing instead of optimizing their responses for accuracy, potentially leading to skewed answers.50

To combat these issues, the researchers decided to change the TIPI into the following format:

Revised TIPI test

Figure 2: Revised TIPI test

They removed the numeric response labels and replaced them with verbal ones, removed the Agree-Disagree format to reduce acquiescence bias, and had questions pop up one at a time to encourage respondents to think more about their answers.

The original and revised TIPI tests were given to 1253 respondents and compared based on completion time, question non-response, paired item reliability, and construct validity. The completion times for both tests were identical, taking an average of 87 seconds each. However, out of the ~12530 questions given to all respondents, the original had 12 total questions left unanswered (1.7%), while the revised only had 2 total questions left unanswered (0.3%).51

The paired item reliability — the higher the reliability, the higher the probability that you are accurately measuring a personality trait — was measured during Pearson’s r.

Table 1: Paired Item Reliability using Pearson’s R
Trait Original Revised
Extraversion -.23 \(-.28\)
Neuroticism -0.36 \(-0.43\)
Conscientiousness -.31 \(-.46\)
Agreeableness \(-.22\) -.13
Openness -.42 \(-.50\)

Out of the five traits, only agreeableness was measured better by the original test, showing that the revised version often had more accurate results.52

The study also tested the construct validity — how well a test measures the appropriateness of inferences made using test results53 — for both the original and revised TIPI test.

Table 2: Construct Validity of TIPI Tests
Expectation Result
Conscientiousness associated with recycling Detected only by revised TIPI.
Conscientiousness associated with health Revised effect size 2x larger.
Conscientiousness associated with voter turnout, voter registration, and political knowledge None detected by the original TIPI. All detected by revised TIPI.
Conscientiousness associated with political conservatism Detected only by revised TIPI.
Openness associated with political liberalism Found in both TIPIs.
Openness negatively associated with racism Detected only by revised TIPI.
Neuroticism associated with worse health Revised effect size 2x larger.

Overall, the revised test was an improvement over the original test for 4/5 traits by increasing response rates, reliability, and validity. By implementing these “costless improvements”, the TIPI test could produce significantly more accurate Big Five test results!54

Applications in Society

You can apply the Big Five personality traits to predict future behavior.

A popular example is that high conscientiousness and low neuroticism are correlated with stronger job performance and higher wages. This information could potentially shape businesses’ hiring and recruiting practices, as they’ve already begun to use the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to narrow down the applicant pool.

This has the potential to be a positive addition: Bad hires can cost “up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings” - a significant loss for the business if “46% of newly-hired employees [are] deemed failures”.55 But, the Big Five personality test is self-assessed – lying on it becomes a trivial task.

High conscientiousness is also a general indicator of superior academic performance. This is because conscientiousness and agreeableness were “positively related with all four learning styles (synthesis analysis, methodical study, fact retention, and elaborative processing)”. It was also concluded that the Big Five “explained 14% of the variance in [a student’s] grade point average” whereas “learning systems explained an additional 3%”, establishing a clear connection between personality traits and learning styles improving one’s academics.56

Certain traits can also correlate with specific learning styles. In a study, they identified four types of learning styles:

Meaning Directed: Focuses on self-regulated learning and critical information synthesis, developing independent thinking, and establishing connections between ideas and concepts.

Reproduction Directed: Focuses on memorizing and rehearsing information, directed by an external figurehead (teacher). Typically, the information is memorized to be reproduced/recalled on a test.

Application Directed: Focuses on understanding and learning to meet certifications of accreditation, emphasizes real-world applications and examples.

Undirected: Enjoys cooperative learning, directed by an external figurehead, and has difficulty finding ways to approach their studying and self-regulation.

These learning styles are a part of Vermunt’s Inventory of Learning and have been validated through several studies.57 However, it has fallen out of favor with the public since the introduction of the VARK (visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic).58

The correlations between Big Five traits and VARK learning styles are shown in the table below. A ‘+’ represents a positive correlation, a ‘-’ represents a negative correlation, and a blank cell means that there is no correlation between the two variables.

Table 3: Correlation between Big Five and Vermunt’s learning styles
Meaning Directed Reproduction Directed Application Directed Undirected
Extraversion \(+\) \(+\) \(+\)
Conscientiousness \(+\) \(+\) \(+\) \(-\)
Neuroticism \(-\) \(-\) \(+\)
Agreeableness \(+\) \(+\)
Openness \(+\) \(+\) \(-\)

This connection could potentially let teachers better assist struggling students, using personalized tactics that best suit their needs. For example, neurotic and undirected students could benefit from individual attention or asking other students to form groups and teach each other the concepts. Teachers could opt for more independent assignments for conscientious students, or give more thorough instructions to more agreeable students.

There are also various patterns with Big Five traits and an individual’s health. First, conscientiousness is the strongest predictor for reduced morality — being a conscientious person makes you 30% less likely to die when compared to the average population. This is because they tend to make better health choices by staying fit, cooperating when given medical advice, having better sleeping habits, and are less likely to smoke. Conscientiousness is also tied to having more supportive relationships, thriving at work, and having better stress management.59

People with Alzheimer’s typically see a significant decrease in conscientiousness and a large increase in neuroticism. Decreases in extraversion, openness, and agreeableness were also spotted. These Big Five traits could assist in an early diagnosis for the patient. In addition, Heroin and Ecstasy users showed patterns when testing their Big Five traits. Heroin users had high neuroticism and openness while Ecstasy had high extraversion and openness. Both also had lower agreeableness and conscientiousness.60

Mental disorders are also linked to neuroticism – especially during adolescence.

Spin-off Models

Several spin-off tests were created due to the oversights or limitations of the current Big Five model.

(Alternative) Big Five

The alternative five model of personality (ZKPQ) was created by Zukerman containing the following five basic traits:

  1. Impulsive-sensation seeking

Measures the tendency to act without thinking and one’s liking for novelty, unpredictability, and excitement. Negatively correlates with the Big Five’s conscientiousness trait.

  1. Neuroticism–anxiety

Measures general anxiety, fear, and emotionality. Positively correlates with the Big Five’s neuroticism trait.

  1. Aggression–hostility

Measures anger and lack of inhibitory control. Negatively correlates with the Big Five’s agreeableness trait.

  1. Sociability

Measure social participation and affiliation. Associated with interacting with people and a dislike of isolation. Positively correlates with the Big Five’s extraversion trait.

  1. Activity

Measures persistence, energetic behavior, and a need to avoid feelings of restlessness. Although it does not have a Big Five trait it’s associated with, studies have suggested that activity and extraversion are positively correlated.61

The main differentiators between the ZKPQ and the Big Five are that there’s no ‘Openness’ trait and Zuckerman bases his model on traits with a “strong biological-evolutionary basis”.

Zuckerman’s model starts out with scales used in psychobiological research, focusing on traits that had comparable behavior in other species. This means including aggression instead of agreeableness and impulsivity instead of conscientiousness, as they’re commonly seen in other species. However, openness can not be identified in non-human species, which is why it is not present in this model.62 Measures of cultural interests and intellectual styles were also omitted to ensure trait translation between species.63

Hence, he integrates Eysenck’s Big Three (extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism) and measures of temperament (emotionality, activity, sociability, and impulsivity) from Strelau’s Temperament Inventory to create the foundation of his model. He then adds sensation-seeking as a trait, since it has been proven to have high heritability and many psycho-physiological and biochemical bases.

Due to the goal of species universality, the ZKPQ exhibits cultural universality for various cultures such as China, Germany, Italy, Spain,64 Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland and the U.S.65 — with some variation in congruence for China and Italy. This means that ZKPQ is incredibly generalizable across humanity — something the Big Five lacks - and allows us to use an Etic approach.

HEXACO

Instead of removing a trait, the HEXACO expands the Big Five model by replacing neuroticism with emotionality – with faucets of fearfulness, dependence, and sentimentality — and including another trait called ‘honesty-humility’ (HH). The faucets for honesty-humility include sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty.66 HEXACO also adjusts some of the Big Five’s faucets. Quick temper, in the Big Five, would be a sign of high neuroticism. For HEXACO, that would be a sign of low agreeableness.

These changes emerged after conducting lexical studies (for lexical hypothesis) in various languages, such as Dutch, French, Korean, Croatian, German, and more, increasing the accuracy of each trait by better defining the scope of each trait and faucet.

Compared to the Big Five, HEXACO is shown to have more predictive power when determining psychopathic traits, egoism, risk-taking, materialism, and unethical business decisions. These results seem a lot more applicable in a corporate context compared to the Big Five — could this be the future of hiring systems?67

Personally, I find that each spin-off model presents a new aspect or has additions that could be considered when evaluating one’s personality. To contribute and grow our understanding of personality, we must be willing to innovate, destroy, and improve previous knowledge to emphasize the most accurate and applicable data. Hence, taking these models into consideration and expanding the Big Five to shore up weaknesses is something I’d be interested in seeing – how much better can it get?

Connections to MBTI

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a test based on Jung’s theory in his work Psychological Types, drawing from the work of Nietzsche and psychologist William James.68 It emphasizes “naturally occurring differences”, claiming that we all have preferences in how our brain works which influence our actions, behaviors, interests, personality, etc.69

The term MBTI has been popularized by the site ‘16Personalities’ - a website offering a free personality test. This is NOT the MBTI I am referring to. 16Personalities is a surface-level personality test that does not use Jungian concepts and simply “uses the acronym format introduced by Myers-Briggs due to its simplicity and convenience” and “redefined several Jungian traits.” 16Personalities is far more similar (but not synonymous) to the Big Five than Jung.70

There are 4 principal psychological functions, presented as two axes:

Intuition / Sensing are irrational and focus on how we perceive the world and gather information. Thinking / Feeling are rational functions that focus on how we judge and process information. You can think of each of them as follows: Intuition is the gut feel of an object, sensing tells us that this object exists, thinking tells us what the object is, and feeling tells us how much this object is worth to us.71

These four functions can be split into attitude-types, where you’re either E (Extraverted) or I (Introverted).72 It is generally described that extraverted functions focus outwards, directing their interest towards the external environment and they act in relation to outward factors. Introverted functions are focused inwards, with the person and their thoughts being the motivating factors on how the function acts.73

Using the psychological functions and attitudes, you can create the 8 basic types of Jung Typology:

Ne

Examples: John Lennon, Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man (from the MCU)

Ni

Se

Example: Freddie Mercury, Madonna, Hinata Shoyo (from Haikyuu!!!)

Si

Examples: Beyonce, Sigmund Freud, Captain America (from the MCU)

Te

Examples: Malcolm X, Michelle Obama, Mike Wazowski (from Monsters, Inc.)

Ti

Examples: Einstein, Bruce Lee, Senku Ishigami (from Dr. Stone)

Fe

Examples: Zendaya, Mariah Carrey, Cedric Diggory (from Harry Potter)

Fi

Examples: Mitski, Brad Pitt, Remy (from Ratatouille)74

Due to the relative popularity of both tests, it’s no surprise that people have acknowledged and researched the potential connections between the Big Five and Jung’s psychological types. However, I find it fascinating that this was a research topic in 1989 by McCrae and Costa — I didn’t realize there was enough interest to generate an entire paper on it!

In the study Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator From the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality, McCrae and Costa analyzed data from 267 men and 201 women to show that intuition, sensing, perceiving, and thinking converged with the Big Five traits.75

With extroverts focusing on the external world and introverts focusing on their internal world (their own thoughts), it’s no wonder that extroverted care more to associate with others and gain energy from external sources — that’s how they instinctively process the world. Of course, this comparison is not perfectly accurate as Eysenck relates to people while Jung’s talks about every external experience. However, it’s clear that there is a slight correlation between both definitions.

Judging functions are said to take the information that the perceiving functions give them and process it. The processing of information typically results in actionable results, developing thoughts stating I should or should not do something. This aligns with conscientiousness as judging functions tend to result in tangible action and improvement, while perceiving functions tend to simply obtain the information and don’t necessarily do anything with it.

Feelers tend to care about people, placing importance on others and themselves. With a strong emphasis on empathy and understanding, they tend to be more agreeable. Thinkers, on the other hand, tend to focus on accuracy and logic above all else. This means that they are happy to disagree with others and stay detached if it allows them to be closer to the objective truth.

This is best shown through the dichotomy of Ne and Si. Ne focuses heavily on new possibilities and exploring different connections between topics. This requires them to be open to new experiences and sensations, observing as much as they can to obtain the novelty they desire. Si, on the other hand, tends to be more cautious and traditional, staying calm and evaluating the pros and cons of an action before continuing. This hesitance results in lower openness, as they become more wary of the world.76

This makes sense to me – neuroticism is a combination of genetics, your current situation, your past experiences, and your personality. I don’t think there’s a strong enough correlation between any of the functions to expect someone to be more neurotic. There are too many factors at play!

Beyond ‘Beyond the Dataset’

Beyond this research project, I think it could be incredibly worthwhile to further explore the correlations between various other psychological frameworks to create a comprehensive view of personality. Some other frameworks include Enneagram, Attitudinal Psyche, and Socionics. Of course, the validity of these frameworks can be questioned, especially as they are less popular within the scientific psychology community and have not been rigorously examined. Even then, I still think it’s worth seeing the connections between everything.

I think our sample size from the Kaggle dataset was quite large — which I’m incredibly happy about. However, I’d be curious to these results match up with other online sites that track data for the Big Five. Are the trends that I found within Open Psychometrics just limited to this site or is it applicable to all internet psychology enthusiasts? Will there be discrepancies between the most common types? Furthermore, I’d be interested in doing additional research into the hypothesized (or theoretical) size of each Big Five result. Is SCOAI the most common result because of sampling bias or does it actually represent a large chunk of the population? Theoretical values of the Big Five are difficult to find and I’d love to see a more rigorous study completed, giving me a more credible baseline to compare my experimental results to.

Lastly, I wish I added more ‘applicable’ conclusions within this project. A lot of it was comparing traits against intangible scales, such as the Big Five against other tests, the Big Five against theoretical values, the Big Five against different countries. Or, it was analyzing the Big Five test itself, rather than the results. I’d be interested in doing more research into how the Big Five affects learning styles or how to better yourself once you know your Big Five traits - essentially, how can the Big Five change how you live your life?

  1. Kelland, 10.7: Paul Costa and Robert McCrae and the Five-Factor Model of Personality.↩︎

  2. Philidily, Personality.↩︎

  3. Glaser, The Difference Between Behavior, Personality, and Temperament.↩︎

  4. Wikipedia, Temperament.↩︎

  5. Introvert Palace, The Psychology of Introversion: Eysenck’s Theory of Arousal.↩︎

  6. fractal enlightenment, Jung’s Theory of Introvert and Extrovert Personalities.↩︎

  7. Allen, Understanding the “Big Five” Personality Traits.↩︎

  8. Darby, What Are The Big 5 Personality Traits?.↩︎

  9. T., History of the Big 5: Why This Online Psychometric Test Packs a Punch.↩︎

  10. Rantanen, et al., Long-term stability in the Big Five personality traits in adulthood.↩︎

  11. AlleyDog, Lexical Hypothesis.↩︎

  12. Mlacic, The lexical approach in personality psychology: A review of personality descriptive taxonomies.↩︎

  13. You can see how this has affected this data set, most notably with agreeableness and openness.↩︎

  14. Westen, A Model and a Method for Uncovering the Nomothetic from the Idiographic: An Alternative to the Five-Factor Model?↩︎

  15. Najm, Big Five Traits: A Critical Review.↩︎

  16. Cheung et al., The English Version of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory.↩︎

  17. The public image you project - your ‘face’ in society.↩︎

  18. Ps, The Big Five vs. The Chinese Four: the Next Big Thing in Personality Assessment Follows the Silk Route.↩︎

  19. Cheung et al., Relevance of Openness as a Personality Dimension in Chinese Culture: Aspects of its Cultural Relevance.↩︎

  20. Wikipedia, Religion and Personality.↩︎

  21. Khoynezhad et al., Basic Religious Beliefs and Personality Traits.↩︎

  22. Najm, Big Five Traits: A Critical Review.↩︎

  23. Entringer et al., Big Five personality and religiosity: Bidirectional cross-lagged effects and their moderation by culture.↩︎

  24. Piedmont, Does Spirituality Represent the Sixth Factor of Personality? Spiritual Transcendence and the Five‐Factor Model.↩︎

  25. El-Menouar, The Five Dimensions of Muslim Religiosity.↩︎

  26. Najm, Big Five Traits: A Critical Review.↩︎

  27. Recall that the 5 traits must be independent of each other to be considered within the Big Five model.↩︎

  28. Wikipedia, Religion and Personality.↩︎

  29. ERDEM, Revisiting Quick Big Five Personality Test: Testing Measurement Invariance across Gender.↩︎

  30. Wise et al., The effects of gender socialization on boys and men.↩︎

  31. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2001-08: Vol 81 Iss 2.↩︎

  32. Gender Equality Law, Examples of Gender Sterotypes.↩︎

  33. Schmitt et al., Why can’t a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.↩︎

  34. Schmitt et al., Why can’t a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures↩︎

  35. Schmitt et al., Personality and gender differences in global perspective.↩︎

  36. Recall that I removed any countries that had less than 10 responses to reduce skewing and better visualize the data.↩︎

  37. Laajaj, Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.↩︎

  38. Laajaj, Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.↩︎

  39. Laajaj, Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.↩︎

  40. Laajaj, Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.↩︎

  41. Laajaj, Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.↩︎

  42. Where you answer questions from 1 to 5, where 1 means strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree↩︎

  43. Ray, Acquiescence and Problems with Forced-Choice Scales↩︎

  44. Zhang et al., Improved Properties of the Big Five Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in the Expanded Format Relative to the Likert Format.↩︎

  45. I’d actually argue differently (as seen in the data analysis section), but I have no scientific evidence behind my claim.↩︎

  46. Zhang et al., Improved Properties of the Big Five Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in the Expanded Format Relative to the Likert Format.↩︎

  47. Zhang et al., Improved Properties of the Big Five Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in the Expanded Format Relative to the Likert Format.↩︎

  48. Rammstedt and John, Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German.↩︎

  49. Matthew et al., Improving the measurement of “Big Five” personality traits in a brief survey instrument.↩︎

  50. DeBell et al., Improving the Measurement of the “Big Five” Personality Traits in a Brief Survey Instrument. ↩︎

  51. DeBell et al., Improving the Measurement of the “Big Five” Personality Traits in a Brief Survey Instrument.↩︎

  52. DeBell et al., Improving the Measurement of the “Big Five” Personality Traits in a Brief Survey Instrument. ↩︎

  53. Wikipedia, Construct Validity.↩︎

  54. DeBell et al., Improving the Measurement of the “Big Five” Personality Traits in a Brief Survey Instrument. ↩︎

  55. T., History of the Big 5: Why This Online Psychometric Test Packs a Punch.↩︎

  56. Komarraju et al., The Big Five personality traits, learning styles, and academic achievement.↩︎

  57. Kimatian et al., Undirected learning styles and academic risk: Analysis of the impact of stress, strain and coping.↩︎

  58. The VARK model has many disbelievers for various reasons. See more here: Hederich-Martínez, C. y Camargo Uribe, A. (2019). Critical Review of J.Vermunt’s Learning Pattern Model. Revista Colombiana de Educación, 77, 1-25. doi: https://doi. org/10.17227/rce.num77-9469.↩︎

  59. Sloan, High Levels of This ‘Big 5’ Personality Trait Can Help You Live Longer—Here’s How.↩︎

  60. Wikipedia, Big Five personality traits.↩︎

  61. Wikipedia, Alternative five model of personality.↩︎

  62. Zuckerman, Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (ZKPQ): An alternative five-factorial model.↩︎

  63. Aluja et al., A comparative study of Zuckerman’s three structural models for personality through the NEO-PI-R, ZKPQ-III-R, EPQ-RS and Goldberg’s 50-bipolar adjectives.↩︎

  64. Rossier et al., Zuckerman’s Revised Alternative Five-Factor Model: Validation of the Zuckerman-Kuhlman-Aluja Personality Questionnaire in Four French-Speaking Countries.↩︎

  65. Rossier et al., Zuckerman’s Revised Alternative Five-Factor Model: Validation of the Zuckerman-Kuhlman-Aluja Personality Questionnaire in Four French-Speaking Countries.↩︎

  66. Wikipedia, HEXACO model of personality.↩︎

  67. Feher and Vernon, Looking beyond the Big Five: A selective review of alternatives to the Big Five model of personality.↩︎

  68. Ross, Carl Jung Personality Types.↩︎

  69. Wikipedia, Myers Briggs Type Indicator.↩︎

  70. 16Personalities, Our Theory.↩︎

  71. Ross, Carl Jung Personality Types.↩︎

  72. These do not follow Eysenck’s definition.↩︎

  73. u/Vendrah, Jung Typology Explained (& how Jung types).↩︎

  74. Reddit, Functions Summarized.↩︎

  75. McCrae and Costa, Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator From the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality.↩︎

  76. Psychology Stack Exchange, StructuralEquationModel.↩︎