In the field of human psychology, the Big Five personality traits are made up of 5 very different categories that can be used to describe a wide range of personality types.
The five specific categories are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Let’s take a closer look.
1) Openness is characterized by transparency, honesty and sincerity with a tendency to accept new ideas.
2) Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well with a tendency to think carefully before acting.
3) Extroversion (being an extrovert) is characterized by an outgoing, talkative, and energetic personality.
4) Agreeableness is characterized by being viewed as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate.
5) Neuroticism (being neurotic) is characterized by anxiety, fear, worry, envy, frustration, jealousy, and loneliness.
Under each of these broad categories are other related qualities such as assertiveness, excitement seeking, warmth, activity, and positive emotions.
Why the BIG 5 Model?
The Big Five model is designed to account for different personality traits without overlapping. Research has shown that the Big Five personality traits produce consistent results in interviews, self-descriptions and observations.
Another amazing characteristic about this five-factor structure is that it seems to be found across a wide range of participants of different ages and of different cultures.
