What is a personality?
According to Bleidorn, Hopwood & Lucas (2016) it can be defined by people's tendencies towards certain thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are to some extent consistent over time. Although this idea may appear somehow subjective, there are several practical ways of obtaining a relatively secure knowledge of how a person stand in those aspects. Scientifically, researchers have been using techniques such as brain activation variations (Oxley et al., 2008) and controlled questionnaires - putting emphasis on psychological traits. In this realm, many tests became popular even outside the scientific scope, and one of them stands out: the Big Five, or OCEAN.
This model of personality analysis is constituted by five factors, each of them composed by two aspects: Openness (Intellect and Aesthetics), Conscientiousness (Industriousness and Orderliness), Extraversion (Enthusiasm and Assertiveness), Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness) and Neuroticism (Withdrawal and Volatility). Those dimensions are usually measured through scores, based on the level of agreement to a set of statements the participant is presented to. Commonly, the results are compared to a specific cohort for stronger correlations.
But what makes Big Five different from tests randomly found on the internet, such as Enneagram and DISC? According to Ozer & Reise (1994), it is a reasonable consensus among psychology researchers that the model provides the best and most reliable structure for describing personalities. The findings over time were able to successfully stablish conexions between personality and gender, political behavior, academic and corporate performance and many others variables (Hannagan et al., 2016; Oxley et al., 2008; Rothmann & Coetzer, 2003). Additionally, OCEAN is also been used as a strong predictor of dark tetrad characters (Fernández-del-Río et al., 2020; Book et al., 2016), a finding that supplies studies that may be limited in terms of available sample.
In short, Big Five is extremely useful to many domains of research, specially if the goal is to deeply understand the acts of individuals and populations.
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This was a brief introduction to a series of 6 chapters that I intend to write describing each one of the five factors and its implications to our own realities - as far as my knowledge allows. I aim to use the model as a foundation to some academic papers throughout my Political Science masters and PhD journey, a field that I believe can benefit from this unorthodox approach given its strong institucional roots.
I'll also provide interesting examples, research topics linked to the traits and my personal experience after identifying my scores, since I took the test in 2022 and it was very on point.
I hope you come with me in this academic expedition and find it useful!
If you're interested in knowing your own personality according to Big 5, you'll find below free and paid links to the test:
- https://www.understandmyself.com/
- https://bigfive.com.br/teste-de-personalidade-big-five-brasil/
- https://bigfive-test.com/
- https://www.idrlabs.com/pt/cinco-grandes-fatores-da-personalidade-big-five/teste.php
REFERENCES
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C.J. and Lucas, R.E. (2018), Life Events and Personality Trait Change. J Pers, 86: 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12286
Book, Beth A. Visser, Julie Blais, Ashley Hosker-Field, Tabatha Methot-Jones, Nathalie Y. Gauthier, Anthony Volk, Ronald R. Holden, Madeleine T. D'Agata,Unpacking more “evil”: What is at the core of the dark tetrad?, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 90, 2016, Pages 269-272, ISSN 0191-8869, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.11.009.
Elena Fernández-del-Río, Pedro J. Ramos-Villagrasa, Juan Ramón Barrada, Bad guys perform better? The incremental predictive validity of the Dark Tetrad over Big Five and Honesty-Humility, Personality and Individual Differences,Volume 154,2020,109700,ISSN 0191-8869,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109700.
Oxley DR, Smith KB, Alford JR, Hibbing MV, Miller JL, Scalora M, Hatemi PK, Hibbing JR. Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science. 2008 Sep 19;321(5896):1667-70. doi: 10.1126/science.1157627. PMID: 18801995.
Ozer, D. J. & Reise, S. P. (1994). Personality Assessment. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 357-388.
Rebecca J. Hannagan, Christopher W. Larimer & Matthew V.Hibbing (2016) Sex differences, personality, and ideology: a deeper investigation via contexts in a study of local politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 4:4, 561-578, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2015.1050416
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