What Is Big Five Personality?

In the Big Five model, personality is a set of traits: relatively stable tendencies to think, feel, and act in certain ways across different situations. Those traits are summarized in five broad dimensions, and each person sits at some point on each of them.

This article focuses on that idea of personality: what a trait is, how much it changes, where it comes from, and which instruments measure it. If you’re looking for what the test is for and what it predicts, see what the Big Five test is and what it’s for.

This article is for general information and is no substitute for an assessment by a qualified professional.

What a personality trait is

A trait isn’t a specific behavior but an average tendency. Someone high in extraversion doesn’t talk a lot in every situation: they may be quiet at a funeral or focused at work. What the trait predicts is that, across many situations, that person will seek out company and conversation more often than average.

That’s why traits are measured by asking about habitual patterns (“I’m usually the one who livens up a gathering”) rather than isolated moments. And that’s why a trait predicts behavior averaged over many occasions well, but a specific behavior on a specific day poorly.

Five dimensions, not five boxes

What sets the Big Five apart from models like the MBTI or the Enneagram isn’t the list of traits but their nature: they are continuous dimensions, not categories.

Nobody “is” an extravert the way someone is a zodiac sign. Each person occupies a point on a spectrum, and most are closer to the middle than to the extremes. That’s why two people with a high conscientiousness score can differ quite a bit on the rest of the profile: the model describes a position on five axes at once, not a single label.

Why everyday language ended up capturing exactly these five dimensions is explained by Goldberg’s lexical hypothesis.

Stable, but not fixed

Big Five personality combines two kinds of stability that are worth telling apart.

The first is relative stability: if someone is more organized than their classmates at 20, they will most likely still be more organized at 50. The meta-analysis by Roberts and DelVecchio (2000), covering 152 longitudinal studies, found that this consistency grows with age: correlations between two measurements about seven years apart rose from 0.31 in childhood to 0.54 in the college years, 0.64 at age 30, and a plateau of around 0.74 between ages 50 and 70.

The second is mean-level change: even as each person keeps their position, the whole population shifts. Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer (2006) showed that conscientiousness and emotional stability increase mainly between ages 20 and 40, and that openness rises in adolescence and declines in old age. This pattern is sometimes called the maturity principle: over the years, most people become somewhat more organized, calm, and agreeable.

Where it comes from: genes and environment

Twin and family studies make it possible to estimate how much of the difference in personality is due to heredity. The meta-analysis by Vukasović and Bratko (2015), with more than 100,000 participants, puts it at around 40%, with no large differences among the five traits. The rest is split between environment and measurement error.

A striking finding from that literature, which Plomin and Daniels (1987) put at the center of the debate, is that the environment that matters most isn’t the one siblings share (the same home, the same parents) but the non-shared one: friendships, experiences, teachers, or events unique to each person. Inheriting a tendency, moreover, doesn’t mean it’s written in stone: genes influence probability, not destiny.

How it’s measured: the main instruments

Measuring personality requires standardized questionnaires with published reliability and validity. The most widely used are:

• NEO-PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1992): 240 items, five dimensions, and six facets per dimension. It’s the clinical and professional benchmark, commercial and copyrighted. It has a self-report form and another to be completed by someone who knows the person being assessed well.
• NEO-FFI: its short 60-item version, which gives the five domains without facets.
• BFI and BFI-2 (John, Donahue, and Kentle, 1991; Soto and John, 2017): the BFI has 44 items; its revision, the BFI-2, has 60 and adds 15 facets. Both are very common in research.
• IPIP (Goldberg, 1999): a public-domain item pool, with versions of 50, 100, or more statements, which lets any researcher or website use Big Five questionnaires without a license.
• BFQ (Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Borgogni): an Italian questionnaire with a Spanish adaptation, widely used in workplace settings, which calls extraversion “energy” and openness “open-mindedness.”

In all of them the person indicates how much they agree with descriptive statements on a graded scale, and the scores are compared with norms from a reference sample. What exactly they cover and what they leave out is explained in what the Big Five test actually measures.

Distortion scales

Some professional inventories include distortion or social desirability scales. The BFQ, for example, has a scale called, precisely, Distortion, with statements that almost nobody can honestly endorse, such as never having told a lie. Someone who accepts them across the board is probably trying to present an overly favorable image, which happens often when the questionnaire is used in hiring.

A high distortion score doesn’t automatically invalidate the profile, but it calls for cautious interpretation and, in professional settings, for checking it against other sources, such as an interview.

If you’d rather see it in practice, you can take our Big Five test, an educational adaptation with versions of 10, 50, and 120 statements.

Sources

• Caprara, G. V., Barbaranelli, C. and Borgogni, L. (1993). BFQ: Big Five Questionnaire. Organizzazioni Speciali.
• Costa, P. T. and McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt and F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality psychology in Europe (vol. 7, pp. 7-28). Tilburg University Press.
• John, O. P., Donahue, E. M. and Kentle, R. L. (1991). The Big Five Inventory: Versions 4a and 54. University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research.
• Plomin, R. and Daniels, D. (1987). Why are children in the same family so different from one another? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(1), 1-16.
• Roberts, B. W. and DelVecchio, W. F. (2000). The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: A quantitative review of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 3-25.
• Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E. and Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25.
• Soto, C. J. and John, O. P. (2017). The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 117-143. doi:10.1037/pspp0000096
• Vukasović, T. and Bratko, D. (2015). Heritability of personality: A meta-analysis of behavior genetic studies. Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 769-785.