Big Five personality traits

The Big Five personality traits, also known as the five factor model (FFM), is a model based on common language descriptors of personality. When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person. For example, someone described as "conscientious" is more likely to be described as "always prepared" than "messy". This widely examined theory suggests five broad dimensions used by some psychologists to describe the human personality and psyche. The five factors have been defined as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, often listed under the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE. Beneath each proposed global factor, a number of correlated and more specific primary factors are claimed. For example, extraversion is said to include such related qualities as gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement seeking, warmth, activity, and positive emotions.

That these factors can be found is consistent with the lexical hypothesis: firstly that those personality characteristics that are most important in peoples' lives will eventually become a part of their language; secondly that more important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language as a single word.

People who don't exhibit a clear tendency towards specific characteristics chosen from the above-mentioned related pairs in all five dimensions are [considered] adaptable, moderate and reasonable personalities, but can be perceived as unprincipled, inscrutable and calculating.

The Big five personality traits was the model to comprehend the relationship between personality and academic behaviors. This model was defined by several independent sets of researchers. These researchers began by studying relationships between a large number of known personality traits. They reduced the lists of these traits (arbitrarily) by 5–10 fold and then used factor analysis to group the remaining traits (using data mostly based upon people's estimations, in self-report questionnaire and peer ratings) in order to find the underlying factors of personality.

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