Big Five tests

The Big Five (or Five-Factor Model, OCEAN) is the most scientifically supported personality framework available.

Unlike tests built around fixed types, it places each person somewhere along five continuous spectrums.

• Openness: curiosity and imagination.
• Conscientiousness: discipline and goal orientation.
• Extraversion: social energy.
• Agreeableness: empathy and cooperation.
• Neuroticism: tendency toward negative emotions under stress.

No combination is "better": every profile carries advantages depending on the context.

Origin: from a linguistic hypothesis to a clinical model

The model grew out of the lexical hypothesis and took its modern form with Costa and McCrae in the 1980s, who developed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R): the reference clinical questionnaire that measures the intensity of these same five factors (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) through their facets.

Today the model is standard in clinical psychology, research, and personnel selection. Here you'll find its history, its criticisms, and a breakdown of each trait.

Our test is a popular, informational version inspired by this model: it does not replace the NEO-PI-R or a professional psychological evaluation.

The model took decades to catch on despite existing since the 1960s: US Air Force psychologists Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal described it in a technical report back in 1961, which went largely unnoticed until Lewis Goldberg rediscovered it in 1983.

John Digman's 1990 review went on to become the most cited article in the history of the journal Annual Review of Psychology.

Why it's considered the best-supported model

Since then the model has only gained more support: the five factors are heritable (twin studies show that the five-factor structure itself reflects the structure of the underlying genes) and show up in nearly identical form across more than 50 different cultures, according to the "Personality Profiles of Cultures Project" led by McCrae, Terracciano, and colleagues (2005), a landmark study that gathered thousands of observer ratings from around the world.

Each factor is also linked to concrete, well-replicated life outcomes:

• Neuroticism predicts a higher risk of nearly every personality disorder.
• Extraversion predicts self-reported happiness.
• Openness predicts social and political liberalism.
• Low agreeableness is a risk factor for substance abuse.
• Conscientiousness predicts strong job performance more consistently across occupations than any of the other four factors (Barrick and Mount, 1991).

Open debates and the relationship with the MBTI

The model also has open debates, a sign that it remains active science rather than settled dogma: some researchers (Ashton and Lee) argue for a six-factor model (HEXACO) that adds Honesty-Humility as its own dimension; others (Digman) have found that the five factors themselves cluster into two even broader, higher-order factors.

Interestingly, three of the four MBTI preferences correlate noticeably with Big Five traits (McCrae and Costa, 1989):

• Extraversion with Extraversion.
• Intuition with Openness.
• Feeling with (low) Agreeableness.

The fourth, Judging-Perceiving, correlates with Conscientiousness far more weakly than the other three pairs do, so the correspondence between the two models is real but uneven, not a clean 1:1 translation of four letters into four traits.

Sources

• Tupes, E. C., & Christal, R. E. (1961/1992). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings. Journal of Personality.
• Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology.
• Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
• McCrae, R. R. (2009). The Five-Factor Model of personality traits: consensus and controversy. In Corr, P. J., & Matthews, G. (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology.
• Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2005). Honesty-Humility, the Big Five, and the Five-Factor Model. Journal of Personality.
• Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology.
• McCrae, R. R., Terracciano, A. et al. (2005). Universal features of personality traits from the observer's perspective: data from 50 cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.