My obsession with personality tests started with the Enneagram when I was like 14-15, and moved on the MBTI when I was 16 (although I’d really rather call it Jungian functions). Unfortunately, no one in the psych department (including me now) will ever endorse the MBTI. But one personality test they DO like, that’s been haunting me in lectures, is the Big Five, which is like the only personality test they seem to care about, and I hate it.
The Big Five is stupid. At least, stupider than you might think. We need to do better. Here I’m going to point out all its flaws, so that you can proceed to bring it up in conversations and slam it to anyone who says “but it’s scientifically accurate!”*
*Okay yes, let’s be real: it is the most scientifically robust thing we have for personality theory. It’s been the subject of a great number of replication studies, has produced reliable correlations between the Big Five traits and things like job performance and health, and relative to other mainstream personality tests, has a much better methodology backing it. Doesn’t make it good.
What’s the Big Five? It’s a list of five personality traits that have been found to most reliably measure human behaviour: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Openness (to experience), and Agreeableness. So basically, you can be high/low/medium/whatever in each of these traits, and combined, these five traits will ‘explain the majority of your personality’.
First and foremost, the Big Five was developed on a concept called the Lexical Hypothesis. It’s the theory that a particular language will encompass all the culture’s relevant words of describing a person. Think about terms like ‘boujie’ and ‘dank’ which we’ve developed to describe certain kinds of people in a really culturally-accurate kind of way.
Two guys Allport & Oddbert liked this hypothesis, and decided to make a personality theory based on it. They took 16,000 different adjectives/adverbs from the dictionary, whittled it down to 4,000 relevant words, and went around asking people which of those words they would use to describe their friends and family. Later on Tupes & Cristal took this data. Using a statistical technique called factor analysis, they claimed to find 5 significant traits that encompassed all the words that people would use the most.
Yeah so that’s it. No fancy theory of humans. Just: “I guess people use these words a lot to describe people, so that must be real.”
Well okay, maybe there’s some theoretical truth to these five factors based on the lexical hypothesis. The data sampled responses from hundreds of thousands of people, so any kind of convergence should be statistically significant. Yeah, EXCEPT THAT:
#1: The number of traits in the Big Five is arbitrarily determined.
Here’s the thing about factor analysis. People think it’s objective because it’s a statistical method. Well it ain’t. Factor analysis results are subject to an incredible amount of self-interpretation by the researcher. We can see this from the fact that other guys sampled the same data, but found a different number of factors.
Cattell used Allport & Oddbert’s data and found 16 significant factors that sufficiently encompass human personality – his theory is known as the 16PF. On the lower extreme, Eysenck was like “no, five is too many” and came up with the Gigantic Three (hahaha). Now recent cross-language studies are saying that there should be six factors, known as the HEXACO. The Big Five is arbitrary. There, I said it.
#2: The Big Five is shallow.
Someone described the Big Five as being about the ‘Psychology of a Stranger‘. Basically, the Big Five will tell you helpful things to know for someone you’ve never met, but doesn’t provide any deep knowledge, no complex integration of their past and present and future. I couldn’t agree more. So you’re high in openness? Uh… great! Let us be… open with each other!
I think this comes down to the fact that ‘personality’ is entirely undefined here. Does it refer to your emotional temperament? How you associate with others? Is it context-specific or not? A methodology that operates by asking people “how would you describe others?” is far from specific about this idea of personality. Even the MBTI tries to focus itself around cognitive styles, so it is meant to say little about emotion or other aspects of personality. The DISC measures your attitude towards the environment around you. The Big Five?
Also, some argue that the Big Five only accounts for 56% of the normal personality trait sphere, so it’s hardly a comprehensive theory of personality, even at a surface level.
Look, as un-scientifically validated as the Jungian functions are (I’m not including MBTI in this – modern MBTI is shallow also), they offer some really deep theories about the development of a human’s preferences for viewing and processing the world. Saying that someone has an Fe function (extroverted feeling), for example, indicates that they might be particularly sensitive to the feelings of others, which can then lead into differing expressions of it: maybe they are warm and comforting, or maybe they like to poke into people’s business. It offers a deeper explanation of behaviour. In comparison, saying that someone is “neurotic” is simple – that person worries a lot. They’re neurotic.
If the Jungian functions were true, they’d be so much more helpful than the Big Five. And even if the Jungian functions aren’t true, it’s still a really fun theory. UNLIKE THE BIG FIVE!
#3: The Big Five doesn’t replicate.
For personality tests, especially those based on factor analysis, it’s important that the theory ‘replicates’. Essentially, the personality theory needs to be able to emerge as a ‘fact’, after conducting the “which word do you use to describe others?” survey on any set of humans ever.
I said earlier that the Big Five replicates. Yeah sure it does, but only in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) countries. And of course, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, psychologists didn’t really care about the rest of the world.
Studies sampling Filipino, Japanese, and Korean samples (more collectivist) showed that Extraversion and Agreeableness weren’t significant traits to them. And forager-farmers from Bolivia known as the Tsimane (largely illiterate, indigenous, egalitarian) showed absolutely no significance for any of the Big Five traits.
And that makes sense, right? The Big Five was founded on the lexical hypothesis, which I remind you, is culturally-specific. Obviously you should expect to find different significant traits for each culture and each language!
Conclusion
Use the Big Five with a heavy pinch of salt. I think if you’re using it to assess certain attributes that studies have more-or-less backed up, such as the link between conscientiousness and procrastination (for example), then that’s fine. But I caution against interpreting it too deeply, or taking it beyond the validated studies. There is so much that psychologists don’t know about personality as a science, and current tests are simply not robust.
This applies too to any personality test you see out there – don’t take them too seriously. Use them where they may be enlightening, to help you ask the questions you don’t know how to phrase. Yet remember that nothing can tell you more about someone’s character or personality than getting to know them in person.
joy wang 
Leave a comment