Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Big Five personality traits
Summary
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory.
Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English population, typically referred to as:
openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
When factor analysis is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person. For example, someone described as conscientious is more likely to be described as "always prepared" rather than "messy". These associations suggest five broad dimensions used in common language to describe the human personality, temperament, and psyche.
Those labels for the five factors may be remembered using the acronyms "OCEAN" or "CANOE". Beneath each proposed global factor, there are a number of correlated and more specific primary factors. For example, extraversion is typically associated with qualities such as gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement-seeking, warmth, activity, and positive emotions. These traits are not black and white, but rather placed on continua.
The Big Five model was built to understand the relationship between personality and academic behaviour. It was defined by several independent sets of researchers who analysed words describing people's behaviour. These researchers first studied relationships between a large number of words related to personality traits. They made lists of these words shorter by 5–10 times and then used factor analysis to group the remaining traits (with data mostly based upon people's estimations, in self-report questionnaires and peer ratings) in order to find the basic factors of personality.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.