In this video I briefly describe the Five Factor Model or Big Five, which considers five main dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This model comes from the work of Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, who created the NEO-PI-R assessment in 1990, which uses Likert scale self-reports for 240 personality-related items.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about the work of Raymond Cattell and his 16 personality factors. I also mentioned the work of Hans Eysenck and his attempt to narrow personality down to just two or three dimensions.
But in this video we’re gonna look at what’s probably the most commonly used approach for thinking about traits and personality today. This is the Five Factor Model also known as the Big Five, and this mostly comes from the work of Robert McCrae and Paul Costa. So here’s a picture of Robert McCrae here, and here’s a picture of Paul Costa, and what McCrae and Costa did was in 1978 they created a trait assessment that looked at three main traits and these were neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience. And they later modified this to look at five main traits and so in 1990 they created an assessment called the NEO PI-R. Now the NEO initially referred to neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience but it’s no longer an acronym because now it’s referring to five traits. And then we have PI-R; personality inventory and R for revised.
So what’s on this NEO PI-R? Well, this consists of 240 items and the way that it works is a person looks at each item and they respond to it using what’s called a Likert scale. And so a Likert scale is a scale with five possible responses and these range from strongly disagree to disagree to neutral to agree and then strongly agree. So you’d look at each of these statements relating to personality and you decide how much you think that matches your own personality. Do you agree with that statement? Do you strongly disagree with that statement? Do you strongly agree? Are you fairly neutral? And so by going through the 240 items and using this Likert scale for each of them, you’d come up with where you fall on each of these five main factors.
So what are the five factors that we’re looking at? Well one of these is what’s called openness to experience and so this refers to someone’s curiosity, their willingness to try new things, and have new experiences and it may even be related with their intelligence. Now, next we have conscientiousness and so conscientiousness refers to a person’s tendency to follow through, to get things done, right? They feel a sense of responsibility for things and they also tend to have a higher level of carefulness. Next we have extraversion and this refers to how outgoing somebody is, their level of sociability. And it can also refer to social aspects like their level of confidence or their level of social dominance. Next we have agreeableness and agreeableness refers to someone’s willingness to cooperate and compromise with other people. So it could also include their sense of loyalty or trust in others, and their desire to maintain good social relationships. And lastly we have neuroticism and so neuroticism refers to someone’s level of emotional instability, or their tendency towards anxiety.
Now the idea, as I said, is you would go through the assessment and this would tell you where you stand on each of these five dimensions, right? So this would give you your unique personality profile. So we go through and say okay where do you fall on openness to new experiences? Maybe you’re a little bit higher on that and then your conscientiousness, maybe you’re very conscientious, and maybe you’re not particularly extroverted, and maybe you’re you know sort of right in the middle for agreeableness, or low in neuroticism, right? So you’d go through and we’d see where you fall on each of these different dimensions.
Now you’ll also notice here a nice mnemonic for remembering these five factors which is OCEAN. That can remind you openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Now these labels that were using for each of these factors are up for debate and so that’s something that we can keep in mind is that, it’s important to remember that each of these factors of course refers to many things. That’s what a factor does. In factor analysis we pull out something that refers to many items and so we might think that maybe the term “conscientiousness” isn’t the best term to describe all the things that are included. And there’s still some disagreement on these and this is something I mentioned in a previous video. Alright, so we have to keep in mind that even though it’s a single term it’s actually referring to many things.
We should also remember that there’s potential for overlap between scores on these different dimensions. What I mean by that is your score on one dimension might influence how you express another dimension. So, for instance, we might think about your openness to experience and maybe that’s going to be influenced by your extraversion or you know your level of openness to social experiences might be different than your level of openness to ideas. And so we could think about how we could break these down a little bit further, to get a more detailed view of someone’s personality.
And lastly that brings us to the idea that this is a general assessment, right? It’s not aimed to tell us everything about a single person, right? It’s a nomothetic approach and that means it’s trying to find out about things that are shared by everyone and so it’s going to be more general and that means that your scores on an assessment like the NEO PI-R aren’t going to tell you about your specific behaviors, right? It’s not detailed enough to look at the nuances of a single individual, and so in the next video we’ll take a look at the relationship between scores on trait-based assessments and people’s actual behaviors. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
