Personality
The Big Five
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The Big Five
You don’t need a fancy test to think about your personality or anyone else’s. One of the simplest and most widely researched models of personality is what is called the Big Five. The Big Five refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Just by reading about the Big Five and considering your own behavior, it is pretty easy to tell whether you fall on the high end or the low end, or somewhere in the middle, of the five dimensions.
The Big Five is not about what you like—it is about who you are, it is about how you live. The Big Five tells us how you wake up in the morning and how you go about doing most anything. It has to do with how you experience the world and, as a result, how others experience you. This is important because, when it comes to personality, wherever you go, there you are.
Consider that where we are on the Big Five is about 50 percent inherited. This means that you came into this world with roughly half of who you are already in place, because of genes, prenatal influences, and other biological factors. While you learn to interact with the world somewhat differently as experiences make their mark, personality remains relatively stable over time. Any parent can attest to the power of personality.
When you figure out your highs, mediums, and lows, you have a general profile of your personality, one that should describe your behavior across different situations and times. You can do the same for anyone that you know well, or are starting to know well, and this will bring into relief how similar—or dissimilar—your personalities are. There is no right or wrong personality, there is just your personality and how it fits with the personalities of other people. While it is not better or worse to be high or low or in the middle of the dimensions of the Big Five, it is often the case that we like or dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own.
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