A post by John Rauthmann
I have recently[1] been asked to write a short piece on an article of mine. Almost anything I could write here would be longer than the actual article and just repackaged information.[2] Still, I have compiled below some thoughts, but if you don’t feel like reading that or the article, then please enjoy some memes throughout[3] that summarize the gist:
“We assessed personality with the Big Five.”
This may sound like a perfectly normal and reasonable sentence, but it should not be. It is “normal” because you can read or hear sentences like these[4] almost everywhere – be it in journals, at conferences, or in the media. I am sure I have used such sentences too.[5] In fact, probably most of us did. The problem is: As seductive as it is to be making such statements, they are only a bit true and overselling what the data, a study, or a theory is about. However, personality most certainly is not just the Big Five. Unfortunately, this is not the only reductionist contraction we are often exposed to. Others include: “Personality is just traits”, “traits are just the Big Five”, and “Big Five self-reports capture all there is to personality.”[6] It is not hard to guess that the article this blog post is based on tries to hammer home that all of the preceding assertions are at least partially wrong (and related to each other, though they also occur on their own)..
Personality psychology is essentially about studying human diversity. But why, then, is that diversity reduced to a psychology of traits, often implicitly equated to be (fully subsumed by) the “Big Few” taxonomies[7]?
I am neither a historian nor was I there as a witness, but I do have my little theory about why the Big Five are conflated with the term “personality”[8]. Perhaps the strong association between the Big Five and “personality” can be traced back to darker times of our field as well as our subsequent success story: the person-situation debate[9] represented the downfall of personality psychology (at least in the US-tradition), while the renaissance of the field was partly, though not exclusively, spurred by the advent of a common taxonomic system of (supposedly and mostly) stable, heritable, consequential, and cross-culturally identifiable dispositional traits, the Big Five[10]. That system seemed to defend some key concerns of personality psychology (e.g., that stable traits do exist[11]) and became such a success – within our own field but especially also beyond – that we may consider it both boon and bane. Yes, it helped us speak a common language (and it still does so[12]), it made us popular (and boring[13]), and we got many measures out of it[14]. However, it also led to personality being equated with the Big Five – as if the Big Five are the only and last word on the matter of taxonomizing individual differences[15]. If it put personality psychology “back on the map”, it also fixated our location on said map. The hyper-fixation on “Big Few” taxonomies – and this also includes quarrels about the “right” number of latent factors to extract – has led to an unhealthy reduction of personality psychology to trait psychology. And this, in turn, renders our field unnecessarily narrow.[16].
As personality psychologists studying differences between and within people (across situations, contexts, roles, or time), our scope could be vast: we can study differences in morphological variables (e.g., attractiveness), dispositions (e.g., cognitive abilities, basic tendencies), characteristic adaptations (e.g., skills, needs, values, attitudes, virtues), and narratives (e.g., self-concepts, identities, life stories). All of the preceding individual differences are also parts of “personality”[17], and thus equating the Big Five with “personality” represents a gross restriction of what our field is about. However, many of the things that are important to understanding personality are routinely studied elsewhere (e.g., attitudes, values: social psychology; virtues: positive psychology; skills, competencies: I/O psychology) or have become separate fields with weak(er) links to personality psychology (e.g., identity and self; intelligence and cognitive abilities; needs, motives, and goals). Some of these we have never really claimed; others we have neglected so much (at least in the mainstream) that they wandered off; and some were never ours to begin with. But personality psychology can be understood much more broadly as the science of human nature[18], the last refuge of a generalist[19] interested in anything and everything concerning persons[20], and a hub science[21] that is pluralistic and integrative. Rather than keeping up our reductionist contractions, we should champion and cherish this innate diversity of our field. Perhaps we can also convince others[22] that personality is so much more than just self-reported Big Five traits.
Contractions may happen for different reasons.[23] Regardless of the reason, the literature is replete with findings on “personality” that have actually studied (responses to items sampling) generalized and explicit self-concepts of dispositional trait variables using the Big Five taxonomic system.[24] If we add that those who had given these reports are often predominantly female undergraduate college students of psychology from rather WEIRD countries[25], it is easy to see how a broad and diverse science of personality could not be satisfied with such a state. Of course, understanding how people view themselves (and how those views develop or change across social contexts or time, or how they are related to work and life outcomes) can be important and valuable – and in this regard we have come pretty far already. Nonetheless, explicit Big Five self-concepts represent only a fraction of human personality.
So, how could we move forward? There may be many ways. Two that immediately spring to mind are: Let’s together try to …
1. be more precise in our communications by not equating “personality”, “traits”, “Big Five”, and self-reports with each other
2. use more and other individual differences than just “Big Few traits” in our theories and research, coupled with using more multi-method approaches in diverse or heterogeneous samples
[1] Well, almost 9 months ago …
[2] Maybe check it out? It is short, I promise. I also tried my best to not make it a “ranticle”.
[3] Use at your own discretion. The memes should provoke thought, but they are not meant to offend. They were created with https://imgflip.com/memegenerator. More memes are available upon reasonable request. ;-)
[4] Here are some “best ofs” that should grind our gears: “Personality is described by the Big Five”; “Big Five personality changed across time”; “Personality variability in the Big Five”; “mean/average personality”; and many more!
[5] Please don’t check.
[6] These are different confusions, but they are related.
[7] Mõttus, R., Wood, D., Condon, D. M., Back, M., Baumert, A., Costantini, G., Epskamp, S., Greiff, S., Johnson, W., Lukaszewski, A., Murray, A., Revelle, W., Wright, A. G. C., Yarkoni, T., Ziegler, M., & Zimmermann, J. (2020). Descriptive, predictive and explanatory personality research: Different goals, different approaches, but a shared need to move beyond the Big Few traits. European Journal of Personality, 34(6), 1175–1201. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2311
[8] It is not just mine, though. Jon Adler has made the same points before and independently (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GktyQENF14 at around 32:00).
[9] See, for example: Fleeson, W., & Noftle, E. E. (2009). The end of the person-situation debate: an emerging synthesis in the answer to the consistency question. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(4), 1667–1684.
[10] There are different traditions, most notably the Big Five tradition vs. the Five-Factor Model tradition. Because these differences are rarely if ever invoked these days and to keep things short, I simply use the “Big Five” as a pragmatic summary term without the intention to side with any tradition.
[11] See also: Funder, D. C. (1991). Global Traits: A Neo-Allportian Approach to Personality. Psychological Science, 2(1), 31–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1991.tb00093.x
[12] Bainbridge, T. F., Ludeke, S. G., & Smillie, L. D. (2022). Evaluating the Big Five as an organizing framework for commonly used psychological trait scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(4), 749–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000395
[13] Baumeister, R. F. (2016). Charting the future of social psychology on stormy seas: Winners, losers, and recommendations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 153–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.02.003
[14] Which also has its downsides, especially if scales with the same label do not correlate highly or have different nomological networks. It’s still a jingle-jangle jungle out there!
[15] Condon, D. M. (2023, July 22). Big Five Replicability ARP 2023. Retrieved from https://osf.io/da59z/
[16] … and maybe even less useful than it could be?
[17] McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. (2006). A new Big Five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. American Psychologist, 61(3), 204–217. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066X.61.3.204
[18] Hogan, R. T., & Sherman, R. A. (2020). Personality theory and the nature of human nature. Personality and Individual Differences, 152, 109561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109561
[19] Revelle, W. (2007). Experimental approaches to the study of personality. In R. W. Robins, R. C. Fraley, & R. F. Krueger (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in personality psychology (pp. 37–61). The Guilford Press.
[20] McAdams, D. P. (2009). The person: An integrated introduction to personality psychology (5th ed.). Harcourt College Publishers.
[21] Morf, C. C. (2002). Personality at the hub: Extending the conception of personality psychology. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 649–660. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00517-2
[22] But first ourselves?
[23] Examples may include but are not limited to: trying to communicate in an easy and accessible way (as opposed to a more precise, but perhaps clunky way); needing to heed to a word count or page limit; being sloppy in how terms are used; being inattentive; not caring; being confused
[24] A snarky individual might conclude that personality psychology knows a lot about people’s responses to questionnaire items, including the ways in which they respond to them in different situations (“variability”) or change their responses across time (“development”, “change”). A more optimistic individual might counter that such responses could at least reflect people’s identities or selves – and these are, after all, also important aspects of personality.
[25] White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic: Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X