The Big Five (Ocean)

ABSTRACT

Understanding personality science is the key to optimizing your behaviour and getting to control working dynamics. Every single person has inherited traits from their parents, created others in their childhood and nurtured a complicated, self-developed and multi-dimensional set of characteristics that eventually will define them as a person and their relationships with their surroundings. Researchers have found that there is a science to personality and grouped them into 5 dimensions, fondly known as the Big Five or using the acronym O.C.E.A.N (can also be referred as C.A.N.O.E). Developed from the 1980s onward in psychology traits and with factor analysis applied to personality surveys, these cited dimensions grew to be: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

This article presents the results of a review of numerous studies, to provide a comprehensive overview of the differences between traits and how these affect us. It aims to identify how we can benefit from our “default settings” to build competent working teams and manage big programs or projects through the remark of pioneer individual skills that will germinate in the essential rapport of an entire team. The five basic personality traits is a theory developed in 1949 by D.W. Fiske and later expanded upon by other researchers including Norman (1967), Smith (1981) and McCrae and Cost (1987). We will dive upon the years spent trying to pin down character traits as a way of analysing people’s attitudes and how they were reduced from 4000, to 16 and eventually 5.

History of the theory

In 1936 two American psychologists Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert began to focus on finding the most efficacious way to describe differences between people’s personalities. They suggested that the individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people’s lives would eventually become encoded into their language; the more important the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word. This becomes known as the Lexical Hypothesis . They took 18,000 words from Webster Dictionary to describe personality traits and found adjectives that described non-physical characteristics creating 4500-word bank of observable behaviour markers.

In 1946 Raymond Cattell used the emerging technology of computers to analyse the Allport-Odbert list. He organised the list into 181 clusters and asked subjects to rate people whom they knew by the adjectives on the list, which, through factor analysis generated the 16PF Personality Questionnaire, that remains in use today.

In 1961, two Air Force researchers, Tupes and Christal analysed personality data from eight large samples. Using Cattell’s trait measures, they found five recurring factors. This work was replicated by Norman shortly afterwards. He found that five major factors were sufficient to account for a large set of personality data. At a 1981 symposium in Honolulu, four prominent researchers, Lewis Goldberg, Naomi Takemoto-Chock, Andrew Comrey, and John M. Digman, reviewed the available personality tests and widespread the acceptance of the five-factor model among personality researchers. Beneath each proposed global factor, there were several correlated and more specific primary factors. These traits were not black and white but rather place on continua.

The Big Five Personalities

Fondly known as the Big 5 Personality Traits, or O.C.E.A.N (can also be referred as C.A.N.O.E), this is the most scientific model to comprehend the relationship between personality and academic behaviour. .

Openness

This characteristic includes imagination and insight. The world, other people, and an eagerness to learn and experience new things is particularly high for this personality trait. They demonstrate a general appreciation to the world surrounding as well as demonstrating a bigger awareness of their feelings and to hold more unconventional beliefs. It leads to having a broad range of interests and being more adventurous when it comes to decision making. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor as there is a lack of biological support for this particular trait as it had not shown a significant association with any brain regions as opposed to the other four traits.

- Openness had a 57% genetic influence.

Think of that person who’s always ordering the most exotic thing on the menu, going to different places, and having gobsmacking interests. You could normally describe him/her as someone with a rich vocabulary, vivid imagination, excellent ideas, quickly understanding of things, someone who spends time reflecting on things and is full of ideas.

Anyone low in this trait tends to be viewed with more traditional approached to life and my struggle when it comes to problem solving outside their comfort zone of knowledge as adapting to certain situations may provoke a challenge. They are consistent and cautious.

Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness is a trait that includes high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, and goal-directed behaviours. Describes how organized and dependable you can be and shows a tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully and strive for achievement against measure or outside expectations. The average level of conscientiousness rises among young adults and then declines among older adults

- Conscientiousness has 49% genetic influence.