Big Five vs. Five-Factor Model: Are They the Same Thing?

In practice, yes: “Big Five,” “Five-Factor Model,” and “OCEAN” are used as synonyms for the same five personality dimensions. But the first two names come from two different research traditions, and that history leaves its mark on some nuances, especially in the fifth factor.

”Big Five”: the lexical tradition

The term “Big Five” was born in the lexical tradition, the line of research that studies the adjectives we use to describe people. Lewis Goldberg popularized it from 1981 onward.

The starting point is a simple idea: if a characteristic matters for how we relate to each other, sooner or later the language creates a word for it. Researchers pulled thousands of adjectives from dictionaries, such as sociable, aggressive, or fearful, asked many people to describe themselves or others with them, and analyzed which words tended to be applied together. Those terms grouped systematically into five large clusters.

“Big” doesn’t refer to their importance but to their breadth: each factor covers a multitude of specific characteristics, not one narrow trait.

”Five-Factor Model”: the questionnaire tradition

The label “Five-Factor Model” (FFM) is associated with Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, who didn’t start from the dictionary but from personality questionnaires built with complete sentences. Their work culminated in the NEO-PI-R (1992), which measures each factor through six facets.

The convergence of the two traditions was one of the strongest arguments in the model’s favor: two different methods, the adjectives of everyday language and psychological questionnaires, reached a very similar structure by separate routes.

There’s also a difference in ambition. The lexical approach limits itself to describing how the vocabulary of personality is organized. Costa and McCrae went further with their Five-Factor Theory: they interpret traits as basic tendencies with a substantial biological and genetic basis, which partly cause behavior and stay fairly stable in adulthood, although they are expressed differently depending on the environment. That theory and its alternatives are explained in the Big Five personality trait theory.

The dimensions they share

Today both names refer to the same classification:

• Extraversion: energy directed toward the social and material world, with sociability, assertiveness, and a tendency to feel positive emotions.
• Agreeableness: one pole of prosocial orientation, with altruism and trust, against another of antagonism and distrust.
• Conscientiousness: impulse control in the service of goals, planning, and organization.
• Neuroticism: a tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, nervousness, or sadness more often than average. Its opposite pole is emotional stability.
• Openness to experience, or Intellect: the breadth, depth, and complexity of mental life, with interest in ideas, imagination, and aesthetics.

The nuance still unresolved: Intellect or Openness?

The fifth factor is where the two traditions genuinely disagree, and it isn’t just a matter of naming.

In Goldberg’s lexical studies, the fifth factor comes loaded with adjectives such as intelligent, perceptive, cultured, or imaginative. That’s why he called it Intellect. In Costa and McCrae’s NEO-PI-R, on the other hand, it’s called Openness to Experience, and its six facets include fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values: it covers much more than the intellectual, such as sensitivity to art or a willingness to question norms.

The reason has to do with language. McCrae (1990) argued that openness is poorly represented in everyday vocabulary: the language has many words for intelligence but few for someone who intensely enjoys music or experiences their emotions in depth. A method based on adjectives therefore tends to see only the intellectual part of the factor.

DeYoung, Quilty, and Peterson (2007) proposed a solution that is fairly widely accepted today. Analyzing the facets of several inventories, they found that each of the five domains splits into two aspects. In the fifth, those two aspects are precisely Intellect (interest in ideas and abstract reasoning) and Openness (aesthetic sensitivity, fantasy, and absorption in experience). Each tradition would be weighting one half of the same domain more heavily.

That’s why some authors write “Openness/Intellect” for the fifth factor, and why two Big Five tests can give somewhat different results on this trait depending on which instrument their questions derive from.

There are other open debates about the model, such as its validity outside Western cultures or whether six factors are needed instead of five. We cover them in the criticisms of the Big Five.

Whichever name you prefer, you can see your profile across these five dimensions with our Big Five 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.
• McCrae, R. R. (1990). Traits and trait names: How well is Openness represented in natural languages? European Journal of Personality, 4(2), 119-129.
• McCrae, R. R. and Costa, P. T. (1999). A five-factor theory of personality. In L. A. Pervin and O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C. and Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896.