Personality

The Big Five personality traits explained

4 min read

The short answer: the Big Five are five broad traits that, together, describe most of the ways people's personalities differ: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (often described from the other side, as Emotional stability). Everyone has all five, in different amounts. They are the model of personality most used by researchers today.

Where the Big Five come from

The idea started with language. If a difference between people matters, people will have invented words for it. In the 20th century, researchers collected thousands of personality words ("talkative", "careful", "anxious", "kind"...) and looked at which ones tend to go together in the same people. The same five clusters kept appearing, across different studies, languages and countries. That is why the Big Five are trusted: they were found in the data, not invented by a theory.

The five traits

Openness

How much you are drawn to new ideas, experiences, art and imagination.

• Higher: curious, imaginative, enjoys new things and abstract ideas.
• Lower: practical, prefers the familiar, focused on the concrete and proven.

More detail: what high and low openness scores mean.

Conscientiousness

How organized, careful and goal-directed you tend to be.

• Higher: plans ahead, reliable, finishes what they start.
• Lower: flexible, spontaneous, more relaxed about rules and schedules.

More detail: what high and low conscientiousness scores mean.

Extraversion

How much energy you get from people and activity.

• Higher: outgoing, talkative, enjoys being around others.
• Lower (introversion): reserved, prefers smaller groups or time alone to recharge.

More detail: what high and low extraversion scores mean.

Agreeableness

How you tend to treat other people.

• Higher: warm, trusting, cooperative, avoids conflict.
• Lower: direct, skeptical, comfortable with disagreement and competition.

More detail: what high and low agreeableness scores mean.

Neuroticism, or Emotional stability

How strongly and how often you feel negative emotions such as worry, stress and sadness.

• Higher neuroticism (lower emotional stability): feels stress and worry more intensely.
• Lower neuroticism (higher emotional stability): calm, steady, slow to get upset.

We explain this trait in more detail in What it means to score high or low in neuroticism and in what high and low emotional stability scores mean.

An easy way to remember the five is the word OCEAN.

Things worth knowing

• They are scales, not types. You are not "an introvert" or "an extravert" the way you are tall or short in a box; you sit somewhere on a line, and most people sit near the middle on most traits.
• No end of a scale is better. Each side has its strengths and its costs. High agreeableness makes for good teamwork but can make saying no hard; low agreeableness can make someone a strong negotiator.
• They are fairly stable, but they do change. Studies following people for years find that, on average, people become more conscientious, more agreeable and more emotionally stable as they grow older.
• They are partly inherited. Twin studies suggest that around 40% of the differences between people's traits are linked to genes; the rest comes from life experience.
• They predict some things, on average. For example, conscientiousness is one of the more consistent predictors of how well people do at work. "On average" is important: a trait describes tendencies, not destiny.

How the Big Five are measured

You rate how well a set of short statements describes you, such as "I am the life of the party" or "I worry about things". Your answers are combined into a score for each trait and compared with other people's.

Try it yourself

The Happy Me Personality assessment uses 35 statements from the International Personality Item Pool, a public set of questions used in published research. It takes about 6 minutes and shows where you sit on each of the five traits. It is free, and you do not need an account.

Take the free Big Five personality test

Sources

• Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26–42.
• John, O. P., Naumann, L. P., & Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy. In Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25.
• Vukasović, T., & Bratko, D. (2015). Heritability of personality: A meta-analysis of behavior genetic studies. Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 769–785.
• Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1–26.