Origin of the 5 great personality or Big Five features

Origin of the 5 great personality or Big Five features

The five major personality features, or personality factors are also known as Big Five.

To address each of the features or dimensions, a lexical strategy is used, taking the words used to describe other people and conform to the elements of personality. The 5 great personality features derive from the words that are most used to describe others.

The history of Big Five

Those who first approached the lexical study of the personality were Allport and Odbert, selecting in the Oxford dictionary all the Personality -related concepts.

The selection of notions at first became 17.973 items, so criteria were created to reduce the list to the maximum. In the end, they eliminated words with similar content, leaving 171 different features, which were divided into several categories.

In 1943, Cattell, resorting to the first prepared list, undertook an investigation with thousands of people to find individual differences, taking as reference the features provided by Allport and Odbert. This way, Cattell created 35 bipolar scales, of which 12 personality factors derived, to those who added 4 more scales for a total of 16 traits or factors.

Cattell (16PF) personality factors test: what does it measure

In 1961, two American psychologists, Tupes and Christal, prepared a report for the army using 35 personality traits. After scoring the features, they selected 5 factors, considered as The 5 large personality dimensions, namely: emergence, pleasure, security, emotional stability and culture.

Later, at the beginning of the 80s, Goldberg resumed the approach, resorting to 1710 terms associated with personality, which divided into 75 categories and pointed out 13 factors. It was already in 1985 when the instrument was created to measure individual differences, which is used today, the Neo pi, built by Costa and McCrae, who analyzed Cattell's 16 personality factors to reach the 5 large dimensions.

THE 5 GREAT PERSONALITY WATICE

The five major personality features, or dimensions, are extroversion, pleasure or kindness, responsibility, neuroticism and openness to experience, which make up the Mnemonic acronym Ocean, in English.

EITHERPenness - Opening to experience-;

COnscience - Responsibility-;

ANDXtroversion - Extraversion-;

TOGreeableness - Logarable or kindness;

NEUROTICISM - Neuroticism-.

These factors, at the same time, are made up of thirty facets. Each factor is made up of six facets.

  • Extraversion: These people are usually more social, daring, seek the company and avoid loneliness. Their commitment is greater for the external world than to the inmate, so the new sensations are looking for them in the company of other people. Neither do they feel discomfort when obtaining attention to themselves. The opposite is introversion, in those people who are more independent, more reserved and with less inclination to experience new sensations with others, since they prefer their routine, doing what does not exceed the usual. In addition, introverts prefer solo activities, which does not mean that these people are not social or enjoy contact with others, but that they do it in a different way to extroverts.
  • Opening to experience: This trait refers to the opening that a person has to change. Those who have a haute openness are usually creative, with great imagination, curious, with tastes towards art. They contact their own emotions and those of others, try to have new experiences and ideas. On the opposite side, there are those who are more conventional, with conservative ideas, interest in traditions and familiar.
  • Responsibility: This factor refers to the planning, self -control and organization of a person, that is, to the persistence that demonstrates towards the achievement of their goals. On the other side are those who are more spontaneous, with less self -discipline and informal.
  • Neuroticism: o Little emotional stability. Those who have a low score in this trait usually suffer from anxiety, low tolerance to stress or frustration, focusing more on the consequences of the facts. On the opposite side are people with emotional stability, capable of facing stressful situations, they are flexible and have a lot of calm.
  • Kindness: They are altruistic, solidarity, confident and sincere people, with a great capacity to establish friendly relationships. On the opposite side is the hostility or "non -pleasure", which is not precisely negative, but refers to people with critical or skeptical thinking, attributes that are necessary in the field of sciences, for example.

These are the 5 great personality features or Big Five. They are domains of human personality that explain individual differences. Today this type of test is used to help people choose their professions.

5F Factor Personality Test (Big Five)

Bibliography

  • Caprara, g. V., Barbaranelli, c., Borgogni, l., & Moreno, J. B. (2001). BFQ: "Big Five" Questionnaire. Torch.
  • Sánchez, r., & Ledesma, R. (2007). The five big factors: how to understand personality and how to evaluate it. Knowledge for transformation. Research and Development Series, 131-160.
  • Ter Laak, J. J. (nineteen ninety six). The five large personality dimensions. Magazine of Psychology14(2), 129-181.