research on personality traits asks all of these questions except

• Personality

What Everyone Should Understand About the Big Five Personality Traits

You need to understand the traits, but also their underlying facets..

Posted May 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• What Is Personality?
• Take our Agreeableness Test
• Find a therapist near me
• Each personality trait has underlying facets.
• These facets are valuable to understand to have a more nuanced view of people's motivation.
• A great example comes from recent work on personality change in the college years.

Personality characteristics reflect fairly stable differences between people in their motivations. While situations exert a strong influence on people’s behavior, these default motivations affect both what people do in the absence of a powerful situation, and they also influence the kinds of situations people gravitate toward when they have an option about what to do.

The most prominent scientifically validated set of global personality traits is the Big Five , which consists of the dimensions of Openness, Conscientiousness , Extraversion , Agreeableness , and Neuroticism . These broad traits reflect the biggest differences between people in their motivations.

From the early days of personality research, though, the field has recognized that there are several aspects of motivation underlying each of the dimensions. For example, conscientiousness labels the overall tendency for people to complete the tasks they start. But it reflects this dependability, but also a tendency to take on new goals as well as a desire to have an orderly environment. While these subcomponents hang together, they are not identical. For example, there are people who strive for achievement without desiring an orderly environment (and vice versa).

The broader personality characteristics named by the Big Five are normally called traits . These narrower elements making up the traits can be called facets .

Researchers are still working through which facets ought to be included in each of the Big Five characteristics, but there is reasonable overlap between the various systems that have been developed. To give you a feel for these facets, I’ll describe the characteristics that are part of the NEO-FFI scale developed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae.

Openness to Experience : The openness to experience trait reflects people’s orientation toward new ideas and experiences. The facets of this trait are interest in aesthetic experiences (like art and poetry), interest in intellectual pursuits (curiosity), and interest in new ideas and ways of doing things.

Conscientiousness : The conscientiousness trait reflects the degree to which people complete the things they start. The core facts involve an interest in being orderly, a tendency to strive toward goals, and the desire to complete tasks (which makes people dependable).

Extraversion : The trait of extraversion reflects people’s engagement with social life . The core facets involve a person’s degree of sociability, their overall level of positive feeling, and their desire for an energetic and fast-paced existence.

Agreeableness . The trait of agreeableness reflects people’s desire to get along with others. The core facets involve both an avoidance of conflict, and a desire to do things to help others.

Neuroticism . Neuroticism reflects people’s reactions to negative events in the environment . The key facets involve anxiety (the strength of the reaction to threat), depression (the strength of the reaction to loss), and self-judgment (the strength of people’s negative feelings about themselves).

As an example of the way these traits and facets have been used in research, a paper by Theo Klimstra, Erik Noftle, Koen Luyckx Luc Goossens, and Richard Robins in the August 2018 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at change in traits and facets over the college years. This study looked at samples of college students who rated their personality characteristics and also responded to measures of social and academic measures of adjustment to college life both early and late in their college careers.

Consistent with many studies of personality change , the personality measures for this sample were fairly stable overall. Although personality does change over the lifespan, it tends to change slowly. At the trait level, there was a consistent tendency for people’s conscientiousness to increase over the college years and for their neuroticism to decrease.

At the facet level, the pattern was a little different. Within conscientiousness, the facets of being dependable and being orderly were the ones that tended to increase. In addition, while there wasn’t a consistent increase in agreeableness overall, the facets of avoiding conflict and helping others did tend to increase. There was also a tendency for the facet of Openness to Experience, the facet reflecting interest in new ways of doing things tended to increase. Finally, the facet of neuroticism related to depression tended to decrease across the college years.

An interesting aspect of looking at change over time is the possibility of exploring how changes in one variable at one time affect changes in another variable later. This kind of analysis permits an exploration of how people’s adjustment to college life affects their later personality characteristics. For example, high levels of academic adjustment early in college predict later increases in conscientiousness (and all of its facets), increases in agreeableness and the facet of avoiding confrontation, and decreases in neuroticism and decreases in the facets of self-judgment and depression.

The main thing to take away from this discussion is that personality characteristics often label quite broad traits, but the particular level of a trait that a person exhibits might reflect different combinations of these underlying facets. As a result, it is worthwhile to understand both the traits and the facets.

Facebook image: Mariia Korneeva/Shutterstock

Klimstra, T.A., Noftle, E.E., Luycks, K., Goosens, L., & Robins, R.W. (2018). Personality development and adjustment in college: A multi-faceted and cross-national view. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115( 2), 338-361.

Art Markman, Ph.D. , is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

Types of Personality Tests

There's more to personality tests than quirky online quizzes

Judi Ashlock / Getty Images

• Basic Types
• Limitations

There are many different types of personality tests that can help clarify a clinical diagnosis, guide therapeutic interventions, and help predict how people may respond in different situations. Some commonly used types of personality tests include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and the HEXACO Personality Inventory.

We informally assess and describe personality every day. When we talk about ourselves and others, we frequently refer to different characteristics of an individual's personality. For example, we might refer to someone as adventurous, kind, or moody.

Psychologists do much the same thing when they assess personality but on a more systematic and scientific level. They use different types of personality tests to make these assessments. Personality testing and assessment refer to techniques designed to measure the characteristic patterns of traits that people exhibit across various situations.

At a Glance

Personality tests are about much more than silly online quizzes that tell you which "Friends" character you are. They can also be serious tools in diagnostics, therapy, job recruiting and training, and self-reflection. Keep reading to learn more about the different types of personality tests available and how they are used in fields like mental health, psychology research, law, education, and human resources.

Two Basic Types of Personality Tests

How do personality tests work? Personality testing is designed to elicit responses from participants about their behaviors, preferences, emotional responses, interactions, and motivations in order to evaluate personality characteristics and patterns.

There are two basic types of personality tests: self-report inventories and projective tests:

• Self-report inventories involve having test-takers read questions and then rate how well the question or statement applies to them. One of the most common self-report inventories is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) .
• Projective tests involve presenting the test-taker with a vague scene, object, or scenario and then asking them to give their interpretation of the test item. One well-known example of a projective test is the Rorschach Inkblot Test .

The greatest benefit of self-report inventories is that they can be standardized and use established norms. Self-inventories are relatively easy to administer and have much higher reliability and validity than projective tests. Projective tests, on the other hand, are most often used in psychotherapy settings and allow therapists to gather a great deal of information about a client quickly.

For example, a therapist can look not only at a person's response to a particular test item, but they can also take into account other qualitative information such as tone of voice and body language . All of this can be explored in greater depth as people progress through therapy sessions.

How Different Types of Personality Tests Are Used

There are a number of reasons why a person might take a personality test. Personality tests are administered for a number of different purposes, including:

• Assessing theories
• Evaluating the effectiveness of therapy
• Diagnosing psychological problems
• Looking at changes in personality
• Screening job candidates

Personality tests are also sometimes used in forensic settings to conduct risk assessments, establish competence, and in child custody disputes. Other settings where personality testing may be used are school psychology, career and occupational counseling, relationship counseling, clinical psychology, and employment testing.

Examples of Different Types of Personality Tests

Today, a wide variety of personality tests have become popular and are often based upon specific theories of systems of personality. Commonly used personality tests include:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report inventory that categorizes a person's personality into one of 16 different types. It is based on Carl Jung's approach to personality and has become one of the most popular types of personality tests in the world.

The test contains four different scales: extraversion (E)-introversion (I), sensing (S)-intuition (N), thinking (T)-feeling (f), and judging (J)-perceiving (P). Based on a person's responses, they are identified by a four-letter acronym (such as INFP or ESFJ) that describes their specific type.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is one of the most widely used and well-researched types of personality tests. It is used in professional settings to diagnose mental health conditions and evaluate treatment programs' effectiveness. It is also frequently used in business and forensic settings.

The HEXACO Personality Inventory

The HEXACO Personality Inventory measures six key areas of personality: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. The test originates from research on the Big Five personality types.

Other Five-Factor Personality Tests

Various personality tests assess these traits, including The NEO Personality Inventory, the Big Five Inventory, the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), and the Five Item Personality Inventory (FIPI). Research suggests the test can help predict behavior.

The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire

The 16PF Personality Questionnaire identifies personality traits based on Raymond Cattell's trait theory of personality. The test is still widely used today in a variety of settings, including in employee selection, couples therapy, and career counseling.

DISC Assessment

The DISC assessment identifies four main personality categories: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. It is frequently utilized in workplace settings because it focuses more on actions. The test contains 28 statements, each containing four options for the test-taker to choose. Respondents are then identified as one of 12 different personality types based on their results.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

The Rorschach inkblot test is a type of projective personality test that involves giving a subjective interpretation of an ambiguous inkblot. A therapist then interprets the results based on a scoring system, of which several exist. While the test is well-known, it lacks validity, reliability, and diagnostic value.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter was developed in the late 1970s by psychologist David Keirsey. It is a self-report inventory that categorizes personality into four main temperaments. Each temperament is then further subdivided into four different character types.

History of Personality Tests

One of the earliest forms of personality testing, known as phrenology , emerged during the late 18th century and was popularized during the 19th century. This approach involved the measurement of bumps on the human skull, which were then attributed to specific personality characteristics.

Later, psychologists began attempting to determine how many different personality traits there were. Gordon Allport, for example, proposed that there were more than 4,000. Psychologist Raymond Cattell used a statistical technique known as factor analysis to whittle this list down to 16 different personality factors, while Hans Eysenck narrowed the list down to just three.

One of the most popular approaches to personality today is known as the " Big Five" theory of personality . This theory suggests that personality is composed of five broad dimensions: extraversion , agreeableness , conscientiousness , neuroticism , and openness .

Impact of Different Types of Personality Tests

Personality tests can be useful for a number of reasons. These tests can help you learn more about yourself and better understand both your strengths and weaknesses. And while all personality tests are different, learning that you might be high on a specific trait can help you gain greater insight into your own behavioral patterns.

For example, your results on a personality test might indicate that you rate high on introversion . This result suggests that you have to expend energy in social situations, so you need to find time alone to recharge your energy. Knowing that you have this tendency can help you recognize when you are getting drained from socializing and set aside quiet moments to regain your equilibrium.

Tips for Taking Different Types of Personality Tests

There is no way to prepare for a personality test, but there are some things that you can do to make sure that your results are the best reflection of your personality:

• Be honest. Don't try to present an "ideal" version of yourself. Instead, try to just answer in a way that reflects who you are and how you feel.
• Read the instructions. Your results might not be an accurate reflection of you if you don't understand the guidelines or questions.
• Don't try to "beat the test." Avoid trying to guess what you think might be seen as the "ideal" answer. Just respond honestly.

As you start looking at all of the different personality assessments that are available, you will probably notice one thing quite quickly: There are a lot of "informal" tests out there! Just a simple online search will turn up an enormous range of quizzes and tests designed to tell you something about your personality.

The vast majority of quizzes that you'll encounter online are just for fun. They can be entertaining and they might even give you a little insight into your personality, but they are in no way formal, scientific assessments of personality.

Our fast and free personality test can help give you an idea of your dominant personality traits and how they may influence your behaviors:

Potential Pitfalls of Various Types of Personality Tests

While personality tests may be useful at times, this does not mean that they are not without drawbacks and possible pitfalls. The specific pitfalls and limitations for each of the many types of personality tests depend on the specific tests, how it is used, and how the results are applied. The following are just a few things you should consider:

Deception Is Possible

One of the biggest disadvantages of self-report inventories is that it is possible for people to engage in deception when answering questions. Even though techniques can be used to detect deception, people can still successfully provide false answers often in an effort to "fake good" or appear more socially acceptable and desirable.

Introspection Is Needed

Another potential problem is that people are not always good at accurately describing their own behavior. People tend to overestimate certain tendencies (especially ones that are viewed as socially desirable) while underestimating other characteristics. This can have a serious impact on the accuracy of a personality test.

Tests Can Be Long

Self-report personality tests can also be quite long, in some cases taking several hours to complete. Not surprisingly, respondents can quickly become bored and frustrated. When this happens, test-takers will often answer questions as quickly as possible, often without even reading the test items.

Scoring Can Be Subjective

Projective tests also have a number of disadvantages and limitations. The first problem lies in the interpretation of the responses. Scoring test items are highly subjective and different raters might provide entirely different viewpoints of the responses.

Results May Be Inconsistent

Not all personality tests are reliable or valid. Reliability refers to the consistency of a test while validity involves whether the test is really measuring what it claims to measure.

There are many types of personality tests with many different uses. Some are informal, "just for fun" type tests that might give you a laugh or even a little insight into different aspects of your personality. There are also types of personality tests that have been specifically developed for specific purposes and to evaluate key aspects of personality. In such cases, these tests have been standardized and empirically evaluate to help assess the validity and reliability of their results.

Knowing which type of personality test you are taking and recognizing how the results can be interpreted can give you a better idea of what your own results might mean. If you are interested in taking a personality test to learn more about yourself, talk to a licensed mental health professional to learn more.

Schröder VS, Heimann AL, Ingold PV, Kleinmann M. Enhancing personality assessment in the selection context: A study protocol on alternative measures and an extended bandwidth of criteria .  Front Psychol . 2021;12:643690. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643690

Moyle P, Hackston J. Personality assessment for employee development: Ivory tower or real world? .  J Pers Assess . 2018;100(5):507–517. doi:10.1080/00223891.2018.1481078

Iudici A, Salvini A, Faccio E, Castelnuovo G. The clinical assessment in the legal field: An empirical study of bias and limitations in forensic expertise .  Front Psychol . 2015;6:1831. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01831

Cattell HEP, Mead AD.  The sixteen personality factor questionnaire (16PF) . In: Boyle GJ, Matthews G, Saklofske DH, eds.  The Sage Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment: Volume 2 - Personality Measurement and Testing . Sage, 2016. doi:10.4135/9781849200479.n7

Monaro M, Mazza C, Colasanti M, et al. Detecting faking-good response style in personality questionnaires with four choice alternatives .  Psychol Res . 2021;85(8):3094-3107. doi:10.1007/s00426-020-01473-3

Hofer G, Langmann L, Burkart R, Neubauer AC. Who knows what we are good at? Unique insights of the self, knowledgeable informants, and strangers into a person’s abilities . Journal of Research in Personality . 2022;98:104226. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2022.104226

Ferrando PJ, Navarro-González D. Reliability and external validity of personality test scores: The role of person and item error .  Psicothema . 2021;33(2):259-267. doi:10.7334/psicothema2020.346

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Personality Assessments: 10 Best Inventories, Tests, & Methods

Perhaps they respond differently to news or react differently to your feedback. They voice different opinions and values and, as such, behave differently.

If you respond with a resounding yes, we understand the challenges you face.

As more and more organizations diversify their talent, a new challenge emerges of how to get the best out of employees and teams of all personality configurations.

In this article, we embark on a whistle-stop tour of the science of personality, focusing on personality assessments to measure clients’ and employees’ character plus the benefits of doing so, before rounding off with practical tools for those who want to bolster their professional toolkits.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Strengths Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help your clients or employees realize their unique potential and create a life that feels energizing and authentic.

This Article Contains

What are personality assessments in psychology, 4 methods and types of personality assessments, 7 evidence-based inventories, scales, and tests.

• Helpful Tools & Questions

Fascinating Books About Personality Assessments

Resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Personality is a tricky concept to define in concrete terms, and this is reflected both in the number of personality theories that exist and the lack of consensus among personality psychologists.

However, for this article, we can think of personality as the totality of one’s behavioral patterns and subjective experiences (Kernberg, 2016).

All individuals have a constellation of traits and experiences that make them unique yet simultaneously suggest that there are some generalizable or distinct qualities inherent in all humans.

In psychology, we are interested in understanding how traits and qualities that people possess cluster together and the extent to which these vary across and within individuals.

Now, it’s all very well and good knowing that personality exists as a concept and that your employees and clients differ in their groupings of traits and subjective experiences, but how can you apply this information to your professional work with them?

This is where measuring and assessing personality comes into play. Like most psychological concepts, researchers want to show that theoretical knowledge can be useful for working life and brought to bear in the real world.

For example, knowing a client’s or employee’s personality can be key to setting them up for success at work and pursuing and achieving work-related goals. But we first need to identify or assess personality before we can help others to reap these benefits.

Personality assessments are used for several reasons.

First, they can provide professionals with an opportunity to identify their strengths and reaffirm their sense of self. It is no coincidence that research on strengths is so popular or that strengths have such a prominent place in the working world. People like to know who they are, and they want to capitalize on the qualities and traits they possess.

Second, personality assessments can provide professionals with a social advantage by helping them to understand how they are perceived by others such as colleagues, managers, and stakeholders — the looking glass self (Cooley, 1902).

In the sections below, we will explore different personality assessments and popular evidence-based scales.

1. Self-report assessments

Self-reports are one of the most widely used formats for psychometric testing. They are as they sound: reports or questionnaires that a client or employee completes themselves (and often scores themselves).

Self-report measures can come in many formats. The most common are Likert scales where individuals are asked to rate numerically (from 1 to 7 for example) the extent to which they feel that each question describes their thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.

These types of assessments are popular because they are easy to distribute and complete, they are often cost effective, and they can provide helpful insights into behavior. Self-reports can be completed in both personal and professional settings and can be particularly helpful in a coaching practice, for example.

However, they also have downsides to be wary of, including an increase in unconscious biases such as the social desirability bias (i.e., the desire to answer “correctly”). They can also be prone to individuals not paying attention, not answering truthfully, or not fully understanding the questions asked.

Such issues can lead to an inaccurate assessment of personality.

However, if you are a professional working with clients in any capacity, it is advised to first try out any self-report measure before suggesting them to clients. In this way, you can gauge for yourself the usefulness and validity of the measure.

2. Behavioral observation

Another useful method of personality assessment is behavioral observation. This method entails someone observing and documenting a person’s behavior.

While this method is more resource heavy in terms of time and requires an observer (preferably one who is experienced and qualified in observing and coding the behavior), it can be useful as a complementary method employed alongside self-reports because it can provide an external corroboration of behavior.

Alternatively, behavioral observation can fail to corroborate self-report scores, raising the question of how reliably an individual has answered their self-report.

3. Interviews

Interviews are used widely from clinical settings to workplaces to determine an individual’s personality. Even a job interview is a test of behavioral patterns and experiences (i.e., personality).

During such interviews, the primary aim is to gather as much information as possible by using probing questions. Responses should be recorded, and there should be a standardized scoring system to determine the outcome of the interview (for example, whether the candidate is suitable for the role).

While interviews can elicit rich data about a client or employee, they are also subject to the unconscious biases of the interviewers and can be open to interpretation if there is no method for scoring or evaluating the interviewee.

4. Projective tests

These types of tests are unusual in that they present individuals with an abstract or vague object, task, or activity and require them to describe what they see. The idea here is that the unfiltered interpretation can provide insight into the person’s psychology and way of thinking.

A well-known example of a projective test is the Rorschach inkblot test. However, there are limitations to projective tests due to their interpretative nature and the lack of a consistent or quantifiable way of coding or scoring individuals’ responses.

Download 3 Free Strengths Exercises (PDF)

These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to discover and harness their unique strengths.

Download 3 Free Strengths Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

Personality assessments can be used in the workplace during recruitment to gauge whether someone would be a good fit for a job or organization and to help determine job performance, career progression, and development.

Below, we highlight a few commonly used inventories and tests for such career assessments.

1. The Hogan personality inventory (HPI)

The Hogan personality inventory (Hogan & Hogan, 2002) is a self-report personality assessment created by Robert Hogan and Joyce Hogan in the late 1970s.

It was originally based on the California Personality Inventory (Gough, 1975) and also draws upon the five-factor model of personality. The five-factor model of personality suggests there are five key dimensions of personality: openness to experience , conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Digman, 1990).

The Hogan assessment comprises 206 items across seven different scales that measure and predict social behavior and social outcomes rather than traits or qualities , as do other popular personality measures.

These seven scales include:

• Sociability
• Interpersonal sensitivity
• Inquisitiveness
• Learning approach

The HPI’s primary use is within organizations to help with recruitment and the development of leaders. It is a robust scale with over 40 years of evidence to support it, and the scale itself takes roughly 15–20 minutes to complete (Hogan Assessments, n.d.).

2. DISC test

The DISC test of personality developed by Merenda and Clarke (1965) is a very popular personality self-assessment used primarily within the corporate world. It is based on the emotional and behavioral DISC theory (Marston, 1928), which measures individuals on four dimensions of behavior:

The self-report comprises 24 questions and takes roughly 10 minutes to complete. While the test is simpler and quicker to complete than other popular tests (e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), it has been subject to criticism regarding its psychometric properties.

3. Gallup – CliftonStrengths™ Assessment

Unlike the DISC test, the CliftonStrengths™ assessment , employed by Gallup and based on the work of Marcus Buckingham and Don Clifton (2001), is a questionnaire designed specifically to help individuals identify strengths in the workplace and learn how to use them.

The assessment is a self-report Likert scale comprising 177 questions and takes roughly 30 minutes to complete. Once scored, the assessment provides individuals with 34 strength themes organized into four key domains:

• Strategic thinking
• Influencing
• Relationship building

The scale has a solid theoretical and empirical grounding, making it a popular workplace assessment around the world.

4. NEO-PI-R

The NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 2008) is a highly popular self-report personality assessment based on Allport and Odbert’s (1936) trait theory of personality.

With good reliability, this scale has amassed a large evidence base, making it an appealing inventory for many. The NEO-PI-R assesses an individual’s strengths, talents, and weaknesses and is often used by employers to identify suitable candidates for job openings.

It uses the big five factors of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and also includes an additional six subcategories within the big five, providing a detailed breakdown of each personality dimension.

The scale itself comprises 240 questions that describe different behaviors and takes roughly 30–40 minutes to complete. Interestingly, this inventory can be administered as a self-report or, alternatively, as an observational report, making it a favored assessment among professionals.

5. Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)

The EPQ is a personality assessment developed by personality psychologists Hans Eysenck and Sybil Eysenck (1975).

The scale results from successive revisions and improvements of earlier scales: the Maudsley Personality Inventory (Eysenck 1959) and Eysenck Personality Inventory (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964).

The aim of the EPQ is to measure the three dimensions of personality as espoused by Eysenck’s psychoticism–extraversion–neuroticism theory of personality The scale itself uses a Likert format and was revised and shortened in 1992 to include 48 items (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1992).

This is a generally useful scale; however, some researchers have found that there are reliability issues with the psychoticism subscale, likely because this was a later addition to the scale.

6. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

The MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) is one of the most widely used personality inventories in the world and uses a true/false format of questioning.

It was initially designed to assess mental health problems in clinical settings during the 1940s and uses 10 clinical subscales to assess different psychological conditions.

The inventory was revised in the 1980s, resulting in the MMPI-2, which comprised 567 questions, and again in 2020, resulting in the MMPI-3, which comprises a streamlined 338 questions.

While the revised MMPI-3 takes a lengthy 35–50 minutes to complete, it remains popular to this day, particularly in clinical settings, and enables the accurate capture of aspects of psychopathy and mental health disturbance. The test has good reliability but must be administered by a professional.

7. 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)

The 16PF (Cattell et al., 1970) is another rating scale inventory used primarily in clinical settings to identify psychiatric disorders by measuring “normal” personality traits.

Cattell identified 16 primary personality traits, with five secondary or global traits underneath that map onto the big five factors of personality.

These include such traits as warmth, reasoning, and emotional stability, to name a few. The most recent version of the questionnaire (the fifth edition) comprises 185 multiple-choice questions that ask about routine behaviors on a 10-point scale and takes roughly 35–50 minutes to complete.

The scale is easy to administer and well validated but must be administered by a professional.

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

The Positive Psychology Toolkit© is a groundbreaking practitioner resource containing over 500 science-based exercises , activities, interventions, questionnaires, and assessments created by experts using the latest positive psychology research.

Updated monthly. 100% Science-based.

“The best positive psychology resource out there!” — Emiliya Zhivotovskaya , Flourishing Center CEO

Helpful Tools & Questions

In addition to the collection of science-based interventions, we also have to mention a controversial but well-known personality assessment tool: Myers-Briggs.

We share two informative videos on this topic and then move on to a short collection of questions that can be used for career development.

1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

A mother and daughter team developed the MBTI in the 1940s during the Second World War. The MBTI comprises 93 questions that aim to measure an individual on four different dimensions of personality:

• Introversion/extraversion
• Sensing/ intuition
• Thinking/feeling
• Judging/perceiving

The test provides individuals with a type of personality out of a possible 16 combinations. Whilst this test is a favorite in workplaces, there are serious criticisms leveled at how the scale was developed and the lack of rigorous evidence to support its use.

For more information on the MBTI, you might enjoy the below videos:

We recommend that if you employ MBTI, be mindful of its scientific deficiencies and support your personality testing further by completing an additional validated scale.

10 Career development questions

• Tell me about what inspires you. What gets you out of bed in the morning?
• Tell me about your vision for your career/life.
• What aspects of your role do you love? What aspects do you struggle with?
• Tell me about a time where you used your strengths to achieve a positive outcome.
• Are there any healthy habits you want to build into your work life?
• Describe your perfect working day. What would it look like?
• Tell me about your fears.
• What do you value most about your job?
• What goals are you currently working toward?
• How would your work colleagues describe you?

If you are interested in learning more about personality and personality assessments, the following three books are an excellent place to start.

These books were chosen because they give an excellent overview of what personality is and how it can be measured. They also illuminate some issues with personality assessments. They provide a good grounding for any professional looking to implement personality assessments in the workplace.

1. Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential – Carol Dweck

Enter Dr. Carol Dweck and several decades of psychological research she has conducted on motivation and personality.

The main thesis of the book is to explore the idea that people can have either a fixed or growth mindset (i.e., beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world around us). Adopting a growth mindset can be a critical determinant of outcomes such as performance and academic success.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing – Merve Emre

If you are interested in the dark side of psychology assessments, this is the book for you.

This book explores how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed and discusses the questionable validity of the scale despite its widespread popularity in the corporate world.

While many assessments can be helpful for self-reflecting on your own behavior, The Personality Brokers delve into the murky side of how psychological concepts can be used for monetary gains, even when evidence is lacking or disputed.

3. Psychological Types – Carl Jung

This is an excellent book from one of history’s most influential psychologists: Carl Jung.

The book focuses most on extraversion and introversion as the two key types of personality and also discusses the limitations of categorizing individuals into “types” of personality.

For those interested in the science of personality and who prefer a slightly heavier, academic read, this book is for you.

Interested in supplementing your professional life by exploring personality types? Here at PositivePsychology.com, we have several highly useful resources.

Maximizing Strengths Masterclass©

While strengths finding is a distinct and popular topic within positive psychology, we can draw parallels between strengths research and some conceptualizations of personality.

The Maximizing Strengths Masterclass© is designed to help clients reach their potential by looking at their strengths and what energizes them and helping them delve into their authentic selves. As a six-module coaching package, it includes 19 videos, a practitioner handbook, slide presentations, and much more.

Recommended Reading

For more information on personality psychology and personality assessments, check out the following related articles.

• Big Five Personality Traits: The OCEAN Model Explained
• Personality & Character Traits: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
• Personal Strengths Defined (+ List of 92 Personal Strengths)

17 Career exercises

Designed to help people use their personality and strengths at work, this collection of 17 work and career coaching exercises is grounded in scientific evidence. The exercises help individuals and clients identify areas for career growth and development. Some of these exercises include:

• Achievement Story Chart your successes at work, take time to reflect on your achievements, and identify how to use your strengths for growth.
• Job Analysis Through a Strengths Lens Identify your strengths and opportunities to use them when encountering challenges at work.
• Job Satisfaction Wheel Complete the job satisfaction wheel, which measures your current levels of happiness at work across seven different dimensions.
• What Work Means to You Identify how meaningful your work is to you by assessing your motivational orientation toward work (i.e., whether it is something you are called to and that aligns with your sense of self).

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others develop their strengths, this collection contains 17 strength-finding tools for practitioners. Use them to help others better understand and harness their strengths in life-enhancing ways.

17 Exercises To Discover & Unlock Strengths

Use these 17 Strength-Finding Exercises [PDF] to help others discover and leverage their unique strengths in life, promoting enhanced performance and flourishing.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

When managing people, it is always helpful to have insight into why they behave the way they do. The same applies to assisting someone on their career path. Having an understanding of the qualities that influence behavioral responses can improve relationships, parenting, how people work, and even goal setting.

But there are some caveats to be mindful of:

• When using self-reports, take the scores with a pinch of salt, particularly as we all operate with unconscious biases that can skew results.
• Remain open minded about our personality traits; if we are resigned to the idea that they are inherited at birth, fixed, and unchanging, we are unlikely to gain any real discernment into our own evolving identity.
• Labels can oftentimes be limiting. Trying to condense the myriad aspects of an individual into a neat “personality” category could backfire.

In the right hands, validated personality assessments are valuable tools for guiding clients on the right career path, ensuring a good job fit and building strong teams.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Strengths Exercises for free .

• Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs , 47 (1), i–171.
• Buckingham, M., & Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, discover your strengths . Simon and Schuster.
• Cattell, R. B., Eber, H. W., & Tatsuoka, M. M. (1970). Handbook for the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire . Institute for Personality and Ability Testing.
• Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order . Transaction.
• Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (2008). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) . In G. J. Boyle, G. Matthews, & D. H. Saklofske (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of personality theory and assessment, Vol. 2. Personality measurement and testing (pp. 179–198). SAGE.
• Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology , 41 (1), 417–440.
• Eysenck, H. J. (1959). Manual of the Maudsley Personality Inventory . University of London Press.
• Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1964). Manual of the Eysenck Personality Inventory . University of London Press.
• Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1975). Manual of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire . Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
• Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1992). Manual for the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire–Revised . Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
• Gough, H. G. (1975). Manual: The California Psychological Inventory (Rev. ed.). Consulting Psychologist Press.
• Hathaway, S. R., & McKinley, J. C. (1943). The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Rev. ed., 2nd printing). University of Minnesota Press.
• Hogan Assessments. (n.d.). About. Retrieved May 8, 2023, from https://www.hoganassessments.com/about/.
• Hogan, R., & Hogan, J. (2002). The Hogan personality inventory. In B. de Raad & M. Perugini (Eds.), Big five assessment (pp. 329–346). Hogrefe & Huber.
• Kernberg, O. F. (2016). What is personality? Journal of Personality Disorders , 30 (2), 145–156.
• Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of normal people . Kegan Paul Trench Trubner and Company.
• Merenda, P. F., & Clarke, W. V. (1965). Self description and personality measurement. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21 , 52–56.
• Myers, I. B., & McCaulley, M. H. (1985). Manual: A guide to the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator . Palo Alto Consulting Psychologists Press.

Share this article:

Article feedback

What our readers think.

Very insightful yet easy to read article, thank you for sharing! Have you heard of the Strength Finder test from Personality Quizzes? https://www.personality-quizzes.com/strength-finder It’s a free version of Clifton Strengths (although you have to pay to see complete results). I liked the experience, may be worth updating the list!

I learned so much. This article gave me more food for thought.

Let us know your thoughts Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Related articles

Type B Personality Advantages: Stress Less, Achieve More

Type B personalities, known for their relaxed, patient, and easygoing nature, offer unique advantages in both personal and professional contexts. There are myriad benefits to [...]

Jungian Psychology: Unraveling the Unconscious Mind

Alongside Sigmund Freud, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is one of the most important innovators in the field of modern depth [...]

12 Jungian Archetypes: The Foundation of Personality

In the vast tapestry of human existence, woven with the threads of individual experiences and collective consciousness, lies a profound understanding of the human psyche. [...]

Read other articles by their category

• Body & Brain (52)
• Coaching & Application (39)
• Compassion (23)
• Counseling (40)
• Emotional Intelligence (21)
• Gratitude (18)
• Grief & Bereavement (18)
• Happiness & SWB (40)
• Meaning & Values (26)
• Meditation (16)
• Mindfulness (40)
• Motivation & Goals (41)
• Optimism & Mindset (29)
• Positive CBT (28)
• Positive Communication (23)
• Positive Education (36)
• Positive Emotions (32)
• Positive Leadership (16)
• Positive Parenting (14)
• Positive Psychology (21)
• Positive Workplace (35)
• Productivity (16)
• Relationships (46)
• Resilience & Coping (38)
• Self Awareness (20)
• Self Esteem (37)
• Strengths & Virtues (29)
• Stress & Burnout Prevention (33)
• Theory & Books (42)
• Therapy Exercises (37)
• Types of Therapy (54)

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

1 Personality Traits

Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality traits imply consistency and stability—someone who scores high on a specific trait like Extraversion is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time. Thus, trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is called the Five-Factor Model. This system includes five broad traits that can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the major traits from the Big Five can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone’s personality. In addition, some trait theorists argue that there are other traits that cannot be completely captured by the Five-Factor Model. Critics of the trait concept argue that people do not act consistently from one situation to the next and that people are very influenced by situational forces. Thus, one major debate in the field concerns the relative power of people’s traits versus the situations in which they find themselves as predictors of their behavior.

• Five-Factor Model of personality
• OCEAN system of traits
• Person-situation debate
• Personality
• Personality traits
• Social learning

Learning Objectives

• List and describe the “Big Five” (“OCEAN”) personality traits that comprise the Five-Factor Model of personality.
• Describe how the facet approach extends broad personality traits.
• Explain a critique of the personality-trait concept.
• Describe in what ways personality traits may be manifested in everyday behavior.
• Describe each of the Big Five personality traits, and the low and high end of the dimension.
• Give examples of each of the Big Five personality traits, including both a low and high example.
• Describe how traits and social learning combine to predict your social activities.
• Describe your theory of how personality traits get refined by social learning.

Introduction

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative while others are very quiet. Some are active whereas others are couch potatoes. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Each time we use one of these words, words like “talkative,” “quiet,” “active,” or “anxious,” to describe those around us, we are talking about a person’s personality — the characteristic ways that people differ from one another. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences.

Although there are many ways to think about the personalities that people have, Gordon Allport and other “personologists” claimed that we can best understand the differences between individuals by understanding their personality traits.  Personality traits  reflect basic dimensions on which people differ (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions (dimensions like Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or Agreeableness), and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on any specific trait.

An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions rather than distinct personality types. This means that when personality psychologists talk about Introverts and Extraverts, they are not really talking about two distinct types of people who are completely and qualitatively different from one another. Instead, they are talking about people who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution. In fact, when personality psychologists measure traits like  Extraversion , they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels. The figure below shows the distribution of Extraversion scores from a survey of thousands of people. As you can see, most people report being moderately, but not extremely, extraverted, with fewer people reporting very high or very low scores.

There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences.

• To have a personality trait, individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviors related to the trait. For example, if they are talkative at home, they tend also to be talkative at work.
• Individuals with a trait are also somewhat stable over time in behaviors related to the trait. If they are talkative, for example, at age 30, they will also tend to be talkative at age 40.
• People differ from one another on behaviors related to the trait. Using speech is not a personality trait and neither is walking on two feet—virtually all individuals do these activities, and there are almost no individual differences. But people differ on how frequently they talk and how active they are, and thus personality traits such as Talkativeness and Activity Level do exist.

A challenge of the trait approach was to discover the major traits on which all people differ. Scientists for many decades generated hundreds of new traits, so that it was soon difficult to keep track and make sense of them. For instance, one psychologist might focus on individual differences in “friendliness,” whereas another might focus on the highly related concept of “sociability.” Scientists began seeking ways to reduce the number of traits in some systematic way and to discover the basic traits that describe most of the differences between people.

The way that Gordon Allport and his colleague Henry Odbert approached this was to search the dictionary for all descriptors of personality (Allport & Odbert, 1936). Their approach was guided by the  lexical hypothesis , which states that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people. Therefore, if we want to understand the fundamental ways in which people differ from one another, we can turn to the words that people use to describe one another. So if we want to know what words people use to describe one another, where should we look? Allport and Odbert looked in the most obvious place—the dictionary. Specifically, they took all the personality descriptors that they could find in the dictionary (they started with almost 18,000 words but quickly reduced that list to a more manageable number) and then used statistical techniques to determine which words “went together.” In other words, if everyone who said that they were “friendly” also said that they were “sociable,” then this might mean that personality psychologists would only need a single trait to capture individual differences in these characteristics. Statistical techniques were used to determine whether a small number of dimensions might underlie all of the thousands of words we use to describe people.

The Five-Factor Model of Personality

Research that used the lexical approach showed that many of the personality descriptors found in the dictionary do indeed overlap. In other words, many of the words that we use to describe people are synonyms. Thus, if we want to know what a person is like, we do not necessarily need to ask how sociable they are, how friendly they are, and how gregarious they are. Instead, because sociable people tend to be friendly and gregarious, we can summarize this personality dimension with a single term. Someone who is sociable, friendly, and gregarious would typically be described as an “Extravert.” Once we know she is an extravert, we can assume that she is sociable, friendly, and gregarious.

Statistical methods (specifically, a technique called  factor analysis ) helped to determine whether a small number of dimensions underlie the diversity of words that people like Allport and Odbert identified. The most widely accepted system to emerge from this approach was “The Big Five” or “ Five-Factor Model ” (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1987). The Big Five comprises five major traits shown in the Figure 2 below. A way to remember these five is with the acronym OCEAN (O is for  Openness ; C is for  Conscientiousness ; E is for  Extraversion ; A is for  Agreeableness ; N is for  Neuroticism ). Figure 3 provides descriptions of people who would score high and low on each of these traits.

Scores on the Big Five traits are mostly independent. That means that a person’s standing on one trait tells very little about their standing on the other traits of the Big Five. For example, a person can be extremely high in Extraversion and be either high or low on Neuroticism. Similarly, a person can be low in Agreeableness and be either high or low in Conscientiousness. Thus, in the Five-Factor Model, you need five scores to describe most of an individual’s personality.

Traits are important and interesting because they describe stable patterns of behavior that persist for long periods of time (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). Importantly, these stable patterns can have broad-ranging consequences for many areas of our life (Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). For instance, think about the factors that determine success in college. If you were asked to guess what factors predict good grades in college, you might guess something like intelligence. This guess would be correct, but we know much more about who is likely to do well. Specifically, personality researchers have also found the personality traits like Conscientiousness play an important role in college and beyond, probably because highly conscientious individuals study hard, get their work done on time, and are less distracted by nonessential activities that take time away from school work. In addition, highly conscientious people are often healthier than people low in conscientiousness because they are more likely to maintain healthy diets, to exercise, and to follow basic safety procedures like wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets. Over the long term, this consistent pattern of behaviors can add up to meaningful differences in health and longevity. Thus, personality traits are not just a useful way to describe people you know; they actually help psychologists predict how good a worker someone will be, how long he or she will live, and the types of jobs and activities the person will enjoy. Thus, there is growing interest in personality psychology among psychologists who work in applied settings, such as health psychology or organizational psychology.

Facets of Traits (Subtraits)

So how does it feel to be told that your entire personality can be summarized with scores on just five personality traits? Do you think these five scores capture the complexity of your own and others’ characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Most people would probably say no, pointing to some exception in their behavior that goes against the general pattern that others might see. For instance, you may know people who are warm and friendly and find it easy to talk with strangers at a party yet are terrified if they have to perform in front of others or speak to large groups of people. The fact that there are different ways of being extraverted or conscientious shows that there is value in considering lower-level units of personality that are more specific than the Big Five traits. These more specific, lower-level units of personality are often called facets .

To give you a sense of what these narrow units are like, Figure 4 shows facets for each of the Big Five traits. It is important to note that although personality researchers generally agree about the value of the Big Five traits as a way to summarize one’s personality, there is no widely accepted list of facets that should be studied. The list seen here, based on work by researchers Paul Costa and Jeff McCrae, thus reflects just one possible list among many. It should, however, give you an idea of some of the facets making up each of the Five-Factor Model.

Facets can be useful because they provide more specific descriptions of what a person is like. For instance, if we take our friend who loves parties but hates public speaking, we might say that this person scores high on the “gregariousness” and “warmth” facets of extraversion, while scoring lower on facets such as “assertiveness” or “excitement-seeking.” This precise profile of facet scores not only provides a better description, it might also allow us to better predict how this friend will do in a variety of different jobs (for example, jobs that require public speaking versus jobs that involve one-on-one interactions with customers; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). Because different facets within a broad, global trait like extraversion tend to go together (those who are gregarious are often but not always assertive), the broad trait often provides a useful summary of what a person is like. But when we really want to know a person, facet scores add to our knowledge in important ways.

Other Traits Beyond the Five-Factor Model

Despite the popularity of the Five-Factor Model, it is certainly not the only model that exists. Some suggest that there are more than five major traits, or perhaps even fewer. For example, in one of the first comprehensive models to be proposed, Hans Eysenck suggested that Extraversion and Neuroticism are most important. Eysenck believed that by combining people’s standing on these two major traits, we could account for many of the differences in personality that we see in people (Eysenck, 1981). So for instance, a neurotic introvert would be shy and nervous, while a stable introvert might avoid social situations and prefer solitary activities, but he may do so with a calm, steady attitude and little anxiety or emotion. Interestingly, Eysenck attempted to link these two major dimensions to underlying differences in people’s biology. For instance, he suggested that introverts experienced too much sensory stimulation and arousal, which made them want to seek out quiet settings and less stimulating environments. More recently, Jeffrey Gray suggested that these two broad traits are related to fundamental reward and avoidance systems in the brain—extraverts might be motivated to seek reward and thus exhibit assertive, reward-seeking behavior, whereas people high in neuroticism might be motivated to avoid punishment and thus may experience anxiety as a result of their heightened awareness of the threats in the world around them (Gray, 1981. This model has since been updated; see Gray & McNaughton, 2000). These early theories have led to a burgeoning interest in identifying the physiological underpinnings of the individual differences that we observe.

Another revision of the Big Five is the  HEXACO model  of traits (Ashton & Lee, 2007). This model is similar to the Big Five, but it posits slightly different versions of some of the traits, and its proponents argue that one important class of individual differences was omitted from the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO adds Honesty-Humility as a sixth dimension of personality. People high in this trait are sincere, fair, and modest, whereas those low in the trait are manipulative, narcissistic, and self-centered. Thus, trait theorists are agreed that personality traits are important in understanding behavior, but there are still debates on the exact number and composition of the traits that are most important.

There are other important traits that are not included in comprehensive models like the Big Five. Although the five factors capture much that is important about personality, researchers have suggested other traits that capture interesting aspects of our behavior. In Figure 5 below we present just a few, out of hundreds, of the other traits that have been studied by personologists.

Not all of the above traits are currently popular with scientists, yet each of them has experienced popularity in the past. Although the Five-Factor Model has been the target of more rigorous research than some of the traits above, these additional personality characteristics give a good idea of the wide range of behaviors and attitudes that traits can cover.

The Person-Situation Debate and Alternatives to the Trait Perspective

The ideas described in this module should probably seem familiar, if not obvious to you. When asked to think about what our friends, enemies, family members, and colleagues are like, some of the first things that come to mind are their personality characteristics. We might think about how warm and helpful our first teacher was, how irresponsible and careless our brother is, or how demanding and insulting our first boss was. Each of these descriptors reflects a personality trait, and most of us generally think that the descriptions that we use for individuals accurately reflect their “characteristic pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,” or in other words, their personality.

But what if this idea were wrong? What if our belief in personality traits were an illusion and people are not consistent from one situation to the next? This was a possibility that shook the foundation of personality psychology in the late 1960s when Walter Mischel published a book called  Personality and Assessment  (1968). In this book, Mischel suggested that if one looks closely at people’s behavior across many different situations, the consistency is really not that impressive. In other words, children who cheat on tests at school may steadfastly follow all rules when playing games and may never tell a lie to their parents. In other words, he suggested, there may not be any general trait of honesty that links these seemingly related behaviors. Furthermore, Mischel suggested that observers may believe that broad personality traits like honesty exist, when in fact, this belief is an illusion. The debate that followed the publication of Mischel’s book was called the  person – situation debate because it pitted the power of personality against the power of situational factors as determinants of the behavior that people exhibit.

Because of the findings that Mischel emphasized, many psychologists focused on an alternative to the trait perspective. Instead of studying broad, context-free descriptions, like the trait terms we’ve described so far, Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on people’s distinctive reactions to specific situations. For instance, although there may not be a broad and general trait of honesty, some children may be especially likely to cheat on a test when the risk of being caught is low and the rewards for cheating are high. Others might be motivated by the sense of risk involved in cheating and may do so even when the rewards are not very high. Thus, the behavior itself results from the child’s unique evaluation of the risks and rewards present at that moment, along with her evaluation of her abilities and values. Because of this, the same child might act very differently in different situations. Thus, Mischel thought that specific behaviors were driven by the interaction between very specific, psychologically meaningful features of the situation in which people found themselves, the person’s unique way of perceiving that situation, and his or her abilities for dealing with it. Mischel and others argued that it was these social-cognitive processes that underlie people’s reactions to specific situations that provide some consistency when situational features are the same. If so, then studying these broad traits might be more fruitful than cataloging and measuring narrow, context-free traits like Extraversion or Neuroticism.

In the years after the publication of Mischel’s (1968) book, debates raged about whether personality truly exists, and if so, how it should be studied. And, as is often the case, it turns out that a more moderate middle ground than what the situationists proposed could be reached. It is certainly true, as Mischel pointed out, that a person’s behavior in one specific situation is not a good guide to how that person will behave in a very different specific situation. Someone who is extremely talkative at one specific party may sometimes be reticent to speak up during class and may even act like a wallflower at a different party. But this does not mean that personality does not exist, nor does it mean that people’s behavior is completely determined by situational factors. Indeed, research conducted after the person-situation debate shows that on average, the effect of the “situation” is about as large as that of personality traits. However, it is also true that if psychologists assess a broad range of behaviors across many different situations, there are general tendencies that emerge. Personality traits give an indication about how people will act on average, but frequently they are not so good at predicting how a person will act in a specific situation at a certain moment in time. Thus, to best capture broad traits, one must assess  aggregate behaviors, averaged over time and across many different types of situations. Most modern personality researchers agree that there is a place for broad personality traits and for the narrower units such as those studied by Walter Mischel.

Vocabulary to Learn for this Chapter

• Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait names: A psycholexical study.  Psychological Monographs, 47 , 211.
• Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure.  Personality and Social Psychological Review, 11 , 150–166.
• Caspi, A., Roberts, B. W., & Shiner, R. L. (2005). Personality development: Stability and change.  Annual Reviews of Psychology, 56 , 453–484.
• Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., & Lucas, R. E. (2006). The mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality.  Psychological Assessment, 18 , 192–203.
• Eysenck, H. J. (1981).  A model for personality .New York: Springer Verlag.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative description of personality: The Big Five personality traits.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59 , 1216–1229.
• Gray, J. A. (1981). A critique of Eysenck’s theory of personality. In H. J. Eysenck (Ed.),  A Model for Personality  (pp. 246-276). New York: Springer Verlag.
• Gray, J. A. & McNaughton, N. (2000).  The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system (second edition) .Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Matthews, G., Deary, I. J., & Whiteman, M. C. (2003).  Personality traits . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 , 81–90.
• McCrae, R. R. & John, O. P. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications.  Journal of Personality, 60 , 175–215.
• Mischel, W. (1968).  Personality and assessment . New York: John Wiley.
• Paunonen, S. V., & Ashton, M. S. (2001). Big five factors and facets and the prediction of behavior.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 , 524–539.
• Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Golberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2 , 313-345.

This is an edited and adapted chapter.  The original authors bear no responsibility for its content. The original content can be accessed at:

Diener, E. & Lucas, R. E. (2019). Personality traits. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds),  Noba textbook series: Psychology.  Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from  http://noba.to/96u8ecgw

Grateful appreciation to the authors for this original chapter. The authors have no responsibility for this edited and adapted version.

Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike

Personality Traits Copyright © by Chris Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

14.2 Personality as Traits

Learning objectives.

• Describe each of the Big Five personality traits and the low and high end of the dimension.
• Give examples of each of the Big Five personality traits, including both a low and high example.
• Describe other trait models of personality.

Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Personality traits imply consistency and stability; for example, someone who scores high on a specific trait like extraversion is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time. Thus, trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is called the five-factor model . This system includes five broad traits that can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each of the major traits from the “Big Five” can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone’s personality. In addition, some trait theorists argue that there are other traits that cannot be completely captured by the five-factor model. Critics of the trait concept argue that people do not act consistently from one situation to the next and that people are very influenced by situational forces. Thus, one major debate in the field concerns the relative power of people’s traits versus the situations in which they find themselves as predictors of their behaviour.

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative, while others are very quiet. Some are active, whereas others are couch potatoes. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Each time we use one of these words — words like “talkative,” “quiet,” “active,” or “anxious” — to describe those around us, we are talking about a person’s personality, that is, the characteristic ways that people differ from one another. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences.

Although there are many ways to think about the personalities that people have, Gordon Allport and other “personologists” claimed that we can best understand the differences between individuals by understanding their personality traits.  Personality traits  reflect basic dimensions on which people differ (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions — dimensions like extraversion, conscientiousness, or agreeableness — and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on any specific trait.

An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions rather than distinct personality types. This means that when personality psychologists talk about introverts and extraverts, they are not really talking about two distinct types of people who are completely and qualitatively different from one another. Instead, they are talking about people who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution. In fact, when personality psychologists measure traits like extraversion, they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels. From a survey of thousands of people (see Figure 14.8 ), the distribution of extraversion scores indicates that most people report being moderately, but not extremely, extraverted, with fewer people reporting very high or very low scores.

There are three criteria that characterize personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences.

• To have a personality trait, individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviours related to the trait. For example, if they are talkative at home, they tend also to be talkative at work.
• Individuals with a trait are also somewhat stable over time in behaviours related to the trait. If they are talkative, for example, at age 30, they will also tend to be talkative at age 40.
• People differ from one another on behaviours related to the trait. Using speech is not a personality trait and neither is walking on two feet — virtually all individuals do these activities, and there are almost no individual differences. However, people differ on how frequently they talk and how active they are, and thus, personality traits such as “talkativeness” and “activity level” do exist.

A challenge of the trait approach was to discover the major traits on which all people differ. Scientists for many decades generated hundreds of new traits, so that it was soon difficult to keep track and make sense of them. For instance, one psychologist might focus on individual differences in “friendliness,” whereas another might focus on the highly related concept of “sociability.” Scientists began seeking ways to reduce the number of traits in some systematic way and to discover the basic traits that describe most of the differences between people.

The way that Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert approached this was to search the dictionary for all descriptors of personality (Allport & Odbert, 1936). Their approach was guided by the lexical hypothesis , which states that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people. Therefore, if we want to understand the fundamental ways in which people differ from one another, we can turn to the words that people use to describe one another. So, if we want to know what words people use to describe one another, where should we look? Allport and Odbert looked in the most obvious place: the dictionary. Specifically, they took all the personality descriptors that they could find in the dictionary; they started with almost 18,000 words but quickly reduced that list to a more manageable number. Then, they used statistical techniques to determine which words went together. In other words, if everyone who said that they were “friendly” also said that they were “sociable,” then this might mean that personality psychologists would only need a single trait to capture individual differences in these characteristics. Statistical techniques were used to determine whether a small number of dimensions might underlie all of the thousands of words we use to describe people.

The five-factor model of personality

Research that used the lexical approach showed that many of the personality descriptors found in the dictionary do indeed overlap. That is to say, many of the words that we use to describe people are synonyms. Thus, if we want to know what a person is like, we do not necessarily need to ask how sociable they are, how friendly they are, and how gregarious they are. Instead, because sociable people tend to be friendly and gregarious, we can summarize this personality dimension with a single term. Someone who is sociable, friendly, and gregarious would typically be described as an “extravert.” Once we know they are an extravert, we can assume that they are sociable, friendly, and gregarious.

Statistical methods — specifically, a technique called factor analysis — helped to determine whether a small number of dimensions underlie the diversity of words that people like Allport and Odbert identified. The most widely accepted system to emerge from this approach was the Big Five, or five-factor model (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1987). The Big Five comprises five major traits (see Figure 14.9 ). A way to remember these five is with the acronym OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Consider the descriptions of people who would score high and low on each of these traits (see Figure 14.10 ).

Scores on the Big Five traits are mostly independent. That means that a person’s standing on one trait tells very little about their standing on the other traits of the Big Five. For example, a person can be extremely high in extraversion and be either high or low on neuroticism. Similarly, a person can be low in agreeableness and be either high or low in conscientiousness. Thus, in the five-factor model, you need five scores to describe most of an individual’s personality.

At the end of this section, a short scale is presented to assess the five-factor model of personality (Donnellan, Oswald, Baird, & Lucas, 2006). You can take this test to see where you stand in terms of your Big Five scores. John Johnson (n.d.) has also created a “ Short Form for the IPIP-NEO ” with personality scales that can be used and taken by the general public. After seeing your scores, you can judge for yourself whether you think such tests are valid.

Traits are important and interesting because they describe stable patterns of behaviour that persist for long periods of time (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). Importantly, these stable patterns can have broad-ranging consequences for many areas of our life (Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). For instance, think about the factors that determine success in college. If you were asked to guess what factors predict good grades in college, you might guess something like intelligence. This guess would be correct, but we know much more about who is likely to do well. Specifically, personality researchers have also found the personality traits like “conscientiousness” play an important role in college and beyond, probably because highly conscientious individuals study hard, get their work done on time, and are less distracted by nonessential activities that take time away from school work. In addition, highly conscientious people are often healthier than people low in conscientiousness because they are more likely to maintain healthy diets, to exercise, and to follow basic safety procedures like wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets. Over the long term, this consistent pattern of behaviours can add up to meaningful differences in health and longevity. Thus, personality traits are not just a useful way to describe people you know; they actually help psychologists predict how good a worker someone will be, how long they will live, and the types of jobs and activities the person will enjoy. Thus, there is growing interest in personality psychology among psychologists who work in applied settings, such as health psychology or organizational psychology.

Facets of traits (subtraits)

So, how does it feel to be told that your entire personality can be summarized with scores on just five personality traits? Do you think these five scores capture the complexity of your own and others’ characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours? Most people would probably say no, pointing to some exception in their behaviour that goes against the general pattern that others might see. For instance, you may know people who are warm and friendly and find it easy to talk with strangers at a party, yet they are terrified if they have to perform in front of others or speak to large groups of people. The fact that there are different ways of being extraverted or conscientious shows that there is value in considering lower-level units of personality that are more specific than the Big Five traits. These more specific, lower-level units of personality are often called facets .

It is important to note that although personality researchers generally agree about the value of the Big Five traits as a way to summarize one’s personality, there is no widely accepted list of facets that should be studied. The work by researchers Jeff McCrae and Paul Costa (1987) thus reflects just one possible list among many (see Figure 14.11 ). It should, however, give you an idea of some of the facets making up each of the five-factor model.

Facets can be useful because they provide more specific descriptions of what a person is like. For instance, if we take our friend who loves parties but hates public speaking, we might say that this person scores high on the “gregariousness” and “warmth” facets of extraversion, while scoring lower on facets such as “assertiveness” or “excitement-seeking.” This precise profile of facet scores not only provides a better description, it might also allow us to better predict how this friend will do in a variety of different jobs, such as jobs that require public speaking versus jobs that involve one-on-one interactions with customers (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). Because different facets within a broad, global trait like extraversion tend to go together (e.g., those who are gregarious are often, but not always, assertive), the broad trait often provides a useful summary of what a person is like, but when we really want to know a person, facet scores add to our knowledge in important ways.

Other traits beyond the five-factor model

Despite the popularity of the five-factor model, it is certainly not the only model that exists. Some suggest that there are more than five major traits or perhaps even fewer. For example, in one of the first comprehensive models to be proposed, Hans Eysenck suggested that extraversion and neuroticism are most important. Eysenck believed that by combining people’s standing on these two major traits, we could account for many of the differences in personality that we see in people (Eysenck, 1981). So, for instance, a neurotic introvert would be shy and nervous, while a stable introvert might avoid social situations and prefer solitary activities but may do so with a calm, steady attitude and little anxiety or emotion. Interestingly, Eysenck attempted to link these two major dimensions to underlying differences in people’s biology. For instance, he suggested that introverts experienced too much sensory stimulation and arousal, which made them want to seek out quiet settings and less stimulating environments. More recently, Jeffrey Gray suggested that these two broad traits are related to fundamental reward and avoidance systems in the brain. Extraverts might be motivated to seek reward, and thus exhibit assertive, reward-seeking behaviour, whereas people high in neuroticism might be motivated to avoid punishment, and thus may experience anxiety as a result of their heightened awareness of the threats in the world around them (Gray, 1981). This model has since been updated (Gray & McNaughton, 2000). These early theories have led to a burgeoning interest in identifying the physiological underpinnings of the individual differences that we observe.

Another revision of the Big Five is the HEXACO model of traits (Ashton & Lee, 2007). This model is similar to the Big Five, but it posits slightly different versions of some of the traits, and its proponents argue that one important class of individual differences was omitted from the five-factor model. The HEXACO adds honesty-humility as a sixth dimension of personality. People high in this trait are sincere, fair, and modest, whereas those low in the trait are manipulative, narcissistic, and self-centred. Thus, trait theorists are agreed that personality traits are important in understanding behaviour, but there are still debates on the exact number and composition of the traits that are most important.

There are other important traits that are not included in comprehensive models like the Big Five. Although the five factors capture much that is important about personality, researchers have suggested other traits that capture interesting aspects of our behaviour. Refer to the few, out of hundreds, of the other traits that have been studied by personologists (see Figure 14.12 ).

Not all of the above traits are currently popular with scientists, yet each of them has experienced popularity in the past. Although the five-factor model has been the target of more rigorous research than some of the traits above, these additional personality characteristics give a good idea of the wide range of behaviours and attitudes that traits can cover.

The mini-IPIP scale

Below are phrases describing people’s behaviours. Use the rating scale below to describe how accurately each statement describes you. Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex and roughly your same age. Read each statement carefully, and put a number from 1 to 5 next to it to describe how accurately the statement describes you.

• 1 = Very inaccurate
• 2 = Moderately inaccurate
• 3 = Neither inaccurate nor accurate
• 4 = Moderately accurate
• 5 = Very accurate
• _______ Am the life of the party (E)
• _______ Sympathize with others’ feelings (A)
• _______ Get chores done right away (C)
• _______ Have frequent mood swings (N)
• _______ Have a vivid imagination (O)
• _______Don’t talk a lot (E)
• _______ Am not interested in other people’s problems (A)
• _______ Often forget to put things back in their proper place (C)
• _______ Am relaxed most of the time (N)
• _______ Am not interested in abstract ideas (O)
• _______ Talk to a lot of different people at parties (E)
• _______ Feel others’ emotions (A)
• _______ Like order (C)
• _______ Get upset easily (N)
• _______ Have difficulty understanding abstract ideas (O)
• _______ Keep in the background (E)
• _______ Am not really interested in others (A)
• _______ Make a mess of things (C)
• _______ Seldom feel blue (N)
• _______ Do not have a good imagination (O)

In terms of scoring, the first thing you must do is to reverse the items that are worded in the opposite direction. In order to do this, subtract the number you put for that item from 6. So, if you put a 4, for instance, it will become a 2. Cross out the score you put when you took the scale, and put the new number in representing your score subtracted from the number 6.

Items to be reversed in this way: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

Next, you need to add up the scores for each of the five OCEAN scales, including the reversed numbers where relevant. Each OCEAN score will be the sum of four items. Place the sum next to each scale below.

__________ Openness: Add items 5, 10, 15, 20

__________ Conscientiousness: Add items 3, 8, 13, 18

__________ Extraversion: Add items 1, 6, 11, 16

__________ Agreeableness: Add items 2, 7, 12, 17

__________ Neuroticism: Add items 4, 9,14, 19

Compare your scores to the norms below to see where you stand on each scale. If you are low on a trait, it means you are the opposite of the trait label. For example, low on extraversion is introversion, low on openness is conventional, and low on agreeableness is assertive.

19–20 Extremely High, 17–18 Very High, 14–16 High, 11–13 Neither high nor low, 8–10 Low, 6–7 Very low, 4–5 Extremely low

(Donnellan, Oswald, Baird, & Lucas, 2006)

Additional resources

The following YouTube link shows Gabriela Cintron’s student-made video, which cleverly describes common behavioural characteristics of the Big Five personality traits through song:

• Video: 5 Factors of Personality – OCEAN Song (Nguyen, 2017)

The following Vimeo link shows Michael Harris’s student-made video that looks at characteristics of the OCEAN traits through a series of funny vignettes and presents on the Person vs. Situation debate:

• Video: Personality Traits – The Big 5 and More (Harris, n.d.)

The following YouTube link shows David M. Cole’s student-made video about the relationship between personality traits and behaviour using a handy weather analogy:

• Video: Grouchy With a Chance of Stomping (ObserveChange.org, 2017)

Source: Adapted from Diener and Lucas (2020).

Psychology in Everyday Life

Leaders and leadership

One trait that has been studied in thousands of studies is leadership , which is the ability to direct or inspire others to achieve goals. Trait theories of leadership are theories based on the idea that some people are simply “natural leaders” because they possess personality characteristics that make them effective (Zaccaro, 2007). Consider Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada (see Figure 14.13 ). What characteristics do you think she possessed that allowed her to function as the sole member of her party in Parliament when she was first elected?

Research has found that being intelligent is an important characteristic of leaders, as long as the leader communicates to others in a way that is easily understood by their followers (Simonton, 1994, 1995). Other research has found that people with good social skills, such as the ability to accurately perceive the needs and goals of the group members and communicate with others, also tend to make good leaders (Kenny & Zaccaro, 1983). Because so many characteristics seem to be related to leaderhip skills, some researchers have attempted to account for leadership not in terms of individual traits, but rather in terms of a package of traits that successful leaders seem to have. Some have considered this in terms of charisma (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995; Sternberg, 2002). Charismatic leaders are leaders who are enthusiastic, committed, and self-confident; who tend to talk about the importance of group goals at a broad level; and who make personal sacrifices for the group. Charismatic leaders express views that support and validate existing group norms but that also contain a vision of what the group could or should be. Charismatic leaders use their referent power to motivate, uplift, and inspire others. Additionally, research has found a positive relationship between a leader’s charisma and effective leadership performance (Simonton, 1988).

Another trait-based approach to leadership is based on the idea that leaders take either transactional or transformational leadership styles with their subordinates (Bass, 1999; Pieterse, van Knippenberg, Schippers, & Stam, 2010). Transactional leaders are the more regular leaders, who work with their subordinates to help them understand what is required of them and to get the job done. Transformational leaders , on the other hand, are more like charismatic leaders — they have a vision of where the group is going and attempt to stimulate and inspire their followers to move beyond their present status and create a new and better future.

Despite the fact that there appear to be at least some personality traits that relate to leadership ability, the most important approaches to understanding leadership take into consideration both the personality characteristics of the leader as well as the situation in which the leader is operating. In some cases, the situation itself is important. For instance, during the Calgary flooding of 2013, Mayor Naheed Nenshi enhanced his popularity further with his ability to support and unify the community, thereby ensuring that the Calgary Stampede went ahead as planned despite severe damage to the fair grounds and arenas. In still other cases, different types of leaders may perform differently in different situations. Leaders whose personalities lead them to be more focused on fostering harmonious social relationships among the members of the group, for instance, are particularly effective in situations in which the group is already functioning well, and yet it is important to keep the group members engaged in the task and committed to the group outcomes. Leaders who are more task-oriented and directive, on the other hand, are more effective when the group is not functioning well and needs a firm hand for guidance (Ayman, Chemers, & Fiedler, 1995).

Key Takeaways

• Personality is driven in large part by underlying individual motivations, where motivation refers to a need or desire that directs behaviour.
• Personalities are characterized in terms of traits — relatively enduring characteristics that influence our behaviour across many situations.
• The most important and well-validated theory about the traits of normal personality is the five-factor model of personality.
• There is often a low correlation between the specific traits that a person expresses in one situation and those that they expresses in other situations.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Consider your own personality and those of people you know. What traits do you enjoy in other people, and what traits do you dislike?
• Consider some of the people who have had an important influence on you. What were the personality characteristics of these people that made them so influential?
• Consider different combinations of the Big Five, such as O (Low), C (High), E (Low), A (High), and N (Low). What would this person be like? Do you know anyone who is like this? Can you select politicians, movie stars, and other famous people and rate them on the Big Five?

Image Attributions

Figure 14.7. Fwd: How Not to Manage an Introvert? by Nguyen Hung Vu is used under a CC BY 2.0 license.

Figure 14.8. Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Figure 14.9. Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Figure 14.10. Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Figure 14.11. Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Figure 14.12. Used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Figure 14.13. Elizabeth May and Emma Hogbin by Emma Jane Hogbin Westby is used under a CC BY 2.0 license; QueenMotherandWLMK by National Film Board of Canada is in the public domain ; Hayley Wickenheiser at 2010 Olympics by VancityAllie.com is used under a CC BY 2.0 license; Barack Obama Signs Parliament of Canada Guestbook 2-19-09 by Pete Souza is in the public domain .

Long Descriptions

Figure 14.13. Leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May (top left); Queen Mother with Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King (top middle); Hayley Wikenheiser, Captain of Canadian Women’s National Hockey team (top right); Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama signing Canadian Parliamentary guestbook (bottom).

[Return to Figure 14.13]

Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait names: A psycholexical study.  Psychological Monographs, 47 , 211.

Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure.  Personality and Social Psychological Review, 11 , 150–166.

Ayman, R., Chemers, M. M., & Fiedler, F. (1995). The contingency model of leadership effectiveness: Its level of analysis.  The Leadership Quarterly, 6 (2), 147–167.

Bass, B. M. (1999). Current developments in transformational leadership: Research and applications.  Psychologist-Manager Journal, 3 (1), 5–21.

Caspi, A., Roberts, B. W., & Shiner, R. L. (2005). Personality development: Stability and change.  Annual Reviews of Psychology, 56 , 453–484.

Diener, E., & Lucas, R. E. (2020). Personality traits. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds.), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF. Retrieved from http://noba.to/96u8ecgw

Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., & Lucas, R. E. (2006). The mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality.  Psychological Assessment, 18 , 192–203.

Eysenck, H. J. (1981).  A model for personality . New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.

Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative description of personality: The Big Five personality traits.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59 , 1216–1229.

Gray, J. A. (1981). A critique of Eysenck’s theory of personality. In H. J. Eysenck (Ed.),  A model for personality (pp. 246–276). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.

Gray, J. A., & McNaughton, N. (2000). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Harris, M. (n.d.). Personality traits – The Big 5 and more [Video file]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/user4722143

Johnson, J. (n.d.) Short form for the IPIP-NEO. Retrieved from http://www.personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm

Kenny, D. A., & Zaccaro, S. J. (1983). An estimate of variance due to traits in leadership.  Journal of Applied Psychology, 68 (4), 678–685.

Matthews, G., Deary, I. J., & Whiteman, M. C. (2003).  Personality traits . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (1), 81–90.

McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality, 60 , 175–215.

Nguyen, V. (2017, May 19). 5 Factors of personality – OCEAN song [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk8CDXMb8_U&feature=emb_title

ObserveChange.org. (2017, May 15). Grouchy with a chance of stomping [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnaFMjaJtlY&feature=emb_title

Paunonen, S. V., & Ashton, M. S. (2001). Big Five factors and facets and the prediction of behavior.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 , 524–539.

Pieterse, A. N., van Knippenberg, D., Schippers, M., & Stam, D. A. (2010). Transformational and transactional leadership and innovative behavior: The moderating role of psychological empowerment. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31 (4), 609–623.

Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2 (4), 313–345.

Simonton, D. K. (1988). Presidential style: Personality, biography, and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55 , 928–936.

Simonton, D. K. (1994).  Greatness: Who makes history and why . New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Simonton, D. K. (1995). Personality and intellectual predictors of leadership. In D. H. Saklofske & M. Zeidner (Eds.),  International handbook of personality and intelligence: Perspectives on individual differences  (pp. 739–757). New York, NY: Plenum.

Sternberg, R. J. (2002). Successful intelligence: A new approach to leadership. In R. E. Riggio, S. E. Murphy, & F. J. Pirozzolo (Eds.),  Multiple intelligences and leadership (pp. 9–28). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1995). Defying the crowd: Cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity . New York, NY: Free Press.

Zaccaro, S. J. (2007). Trait-based perspectives of leadership.  American Psychologist, 62 (1), 6–16.

Psychology - 1st Canadian Edition Copyright © 2020 by Sally Walters is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Personality psychology

Students also studied