Who invented the Big Five model?

The Big Five Model is a classification system that groups individual differences in personality into five fundamental dimensions.

Many researchers developed it over several decades, and today it is the reference framework for personality research. It places each person at a point on a continuous spectrum for each of the five traits, which describe tendencies in thought, emotion, and action.

Knowing its history helps make sense of something that isn’t obvious at first glance: no single person designed it, and neither did a single research team.

It emerged independently in different research groups over nearly a century, and again and again, without coordinating with one another, the various teams ended up arriving at the same five-factor structure.

Origins in the dictionary and the lexical hypothesis

This model’s story doesn’t begin in a lab, but in natural language: in the words we use every day.

The earliest researchers relied on the lexical hypothesis, which holds that the human characteristics that matter most socially end up, over time, encoded in language.

The theory makes a fairly intuitive claim: if a trait matters for relating to other people and telling them apart, sooner or later there will be a specific word to describe it.

Guided by this principle, psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert carried out a pioneering study in 1936: they set out to pull every term related to human behavior from an English dictionary, word by word.

They compiled nearly 18,000 terms that served to distinguish one person’s behavior from another’s.

This vast list laid the material groundwork for the great majority of later research in the field of personality.

Years later, Raymond Cattell used this enormous dataset to try to build a more manageable psychological structure, one that was easier to work with.

By grouping the terms by meaning and then running statistical analyses, Cattell reduced the thousands of terms to 35 main variables, and from there eventually proposed a questionnaire based on 16 personality factors.

The gradual discovery of the five dimensions

The system Cattell proposed was complicated to apply and hard to replicate: other researchers who repeated his method didn’t arrive at the same 16 factors.

In 1949, Donald Fiske re-evaluated a selection of Cattell’s variables and found that the data grouped naturally into a much simpler structure of just five factors.

It was the first hint of what would become the organizing model we use today.

Confirmation came in 1961. Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, who worked at a U.S. Air Force personnel laboratory, reanalyzed the correlations among trait ratings in eight different samples, including Cattell’s and Fiske’s. They ranged from Air Force recruits with a high school education to graduate students, and the ratings came from peers, supervisors, teachers, and clinicians (as summarized by John and Srivastava, 1999).

In every one of them they identified five recurring factors, with no other dimension of any real statistical weight emerging. Their technical report circulated little outside military circles, which is why it took a while to influence the field.

Shortly afterward, in 1963, Warren Norman replicated these same results, which cemented the basic structure of the taxonomy.

Psychologist Lewis Goldberg was the one who, in 1981, coined the term “Big Five” for this framework.

The word “big” wasn’t meant to suggest that personality boils down to five simple attributes, but to underline the breadth of each category, which actually encompasses many different nuances.

The model’s structural components

Paul Costa and Robert McCrae reached the model by another route, that of questionnaires. Their NEO inventory originally measured three factors: neuroticism, extraversion, and openness (hence the acronym N-E-O). When they saw that lexical studies also found agreeableness and conscientiousness, they added them to the 1985 NEO-PI, and in 1992 they published the revised version, the NEO-PI-R, with six facets per domain.

The review John Digman published in 1990 in the Annual Review of Psychology brought all these lines of work together and helped the five-factor model win general acceptance. The five independent dimensions that make up the structure of personality, according to this model, are the following:

• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Practical relevance of the taxonomy

The gradual adoption of this system transformed the way personality psychology is researched.

Before it arrived there was considerable theoretical disorder: every researcher used their own concepts and their own questionnaires, which made it very hard to compare one study with another.

The Big Five model offered a shared vocabulary that made it possible to bring previously scattered findings together into a single, coherent discipline.

Studies have documented that a person’s profile across these five factors relates to concrete outcomes in their life, such as longevity, leadership ability, or how they adapt to their work environment.

Conscientiousness, for example, has a consistent, positive link with students’ academic performance: people who score high on this trait tend to get better grades, on average.

Various research projects comparing cultures suggest that this same five-factor structure tends to appear across different languages and different forms of social organization.

The fact that these groupings appear so widely suggests, according to some researchers, that the model reflects variations in human behavior that share a deep biological and evolutionary origin, common to the whole species.

Nearly a century after those first dictionaries, you can check your own profile on these five dimensions with our Big Five test.

Sources

• Allport, G. W. and Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(1), i-171.
• Fiske, D. W. (1949). Consistency of the factorial structures of personality ratings from different sources. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(3), 329-344.
• Tupes, E. C. and Christal, R. E. (1961). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings (ASD-TR-61-97). U.S. Air Force.
• Norman, W. T. (1963). Toward an adequate taxonomy of personality attributes: Replicated factor structure in peer nomination personality ratings. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(6), 574-583.
• Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440.
• John, O. P. and Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin and O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (2nd ed., pp. 102-138). Guilford Press.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1981). Language and individual differences: The search for universals in personality lexicons. In L. Wheeler (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 2). Sage.
• Costa, P. T. and McCrae, R. R. (1985). The NEO Personality Inventory manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.