When people think of psychology, they usually have a short list of terms that they know (or think they know) about the subject, including: relationship counseling, subliminal messages, Sigmund Freud, and personality testing. I was quite the same when I first attended school, so when I had the chance to enroll in a third year personality course, I couldn’t wait to learn about something that was mentioned so often in pop culture and the mainstream media.

Looking back, I don’t remember much from that course, but I do remember the Big Five model, which attempts to describe an individual using just five personality traits. These factors are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Perhaps I remember the Big Five (which can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN) because it was the easiest theory to recall and seemed to be the least flakey. Unlike a lot of what I learned in that course, the Big Five is backed by empirical research.

You might find it odd that you could describe a person by using just five personality traits and not the many other descriptors that you could easily list off from the top of your head. However, these factors weren’t chosen ambiguously, they were discovered by using factor analysis, which I’ll explain a little bit about.

What the researchers did was start off with a huge list of adjectives, such as: happy, anxious, creative, curious, moody, aggressive, etc. Then, through interviewing tons of people, they began to group terms that appeared to regularly coincided. For instance, a person who was deemed highly sociable had a more than likely chance of also being talkative and assertive. After this grouping had been completed, the researchers had boiled down their giant list of traits to what is now known as the Big Five. So going back to a person who might be described as sociable and talkative, this individual would probably rate high in extraversion.

I should note that a person isn’t categorized, black or white, as an extrovert (the life of a party) or the opposite (an introvert), but that they rate somewhere along the dimension of extraversion, often not at the extremes. Think of the Big Five as five separate point scales that run from positive to negative.

So does it bother you that your unique and brilliant personality can be (or attempt to be) described by just five factors? Or do you like the idea that something so complex and mysterious in nature can be easily summarized by using the Big Five model?