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The Big Five personality traits are all about the following question:

“Who are you?”

It’s a simple enough question, but it’s one of the hardest ones to answer.

There are many ways to interpret that question. An answer could include your name, your job title, your role in your family, your hobbies or passions, and your place of residence or birth. A more comprehensive answer might include a description of your beliefs and values.

Every one of us has a different answer to this question, and each answer tells a story about who we are. While we may have a lot in common with our fellow humans, like race, religion, sexual orientation, skills, and eye color, there is one thing that makes us each unique: personality.

You can meet hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people, but no two will be exactly the same. Which raises the question: how do we categorize and classify something as widely varied as personality?

In this article, we’ll define what personality is, explore the different ways personalities can be classified (and how those classifications have evolved), and explain the OCEAN model, one of the most ubiquitous personality inventories in modern psychology.

Personality is an easy concept for most of us to grasp. It’s what makes you, you. It encompasses all the traits, characteristics, and quirks that set you apart from everyone else.

In the world of psychology research, personality is a little more complicated. The definition of personality can be complex, and the way it is defined can influence how it is understood and measured.

According to the researchers at the Personality Project, personality is “the coherent pattern of affect, cognition, and desires (goals) as they lead to behavior” (Revelle, 2013).

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association (APA) defines personality as “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” (2017).

However you define personality, it’s an important part of who you are. In fact, personality shows a positive correlation with life satisfaction (Boyce, Wood, & Powdthavee, 2013). With personality having such a large impact on our lives, it’s important to have a reliable way to conceptualize and measure it.

The most prevalent personality framework is the Big Five, also known as the five-factor model of personality. Not only does this theory of personality apply to people in many countries and cultures around the world (Schmitt et al., 2007), it provides a reliable assessment scale for measuring personality.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was influenced by Freud, his mentor, but ultimately came up with his own system of personality. Jung believed that there were some overarching types of personality that each person could be classified into based on dichotomous variables.

For example, Jung believed that individuals were firmly within one of two camps:

Introverts, who gain energy from the “internal world” or from solitude with the self;
Extroverts, who gain energy from the “external world” or from interactions with others.
This idea is still prevalent today, and research has shown that this is a useful differentiator between two relatively distinct types of people. Today, most psychologists see introversion and extroversion as existing on a spectrum rather than a binary. It can also be situational, as some situations exhaust our energy one day and on other days, fuel us to be more social.

Jung also identified what he found to be four essential psychological functions:

Thinking;
Feeling;
Sensation;
Intuition.
He believed that each of these functions could be experienced in an introverted or extroverted fashion and that one of these functions is more dominant than the others in each person.

Jung’s work on personality had a huge impact on the field of personality research that’s still felt today. In fact, the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® test is based in part on Jung’s theories of personality.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow furthered an idea that Freud brought into the mainstream: At least some aspects or drivers of personality are buried deep within the unconscious mind.

Maslow hypothesized that personality is driven by a set of needs that each human has. He organized these needs into a hierarchy, with each level requiring fulfillment before a higher level can be fulfilled.

The pyramid is organized from bottom to top (pictured to the right), beginning with the most basic need (McLeod, 2007):

Physiological needs (food, water, warmth, rest);
Safety needs (security, safety);
Belongingness and love needs (intimate relationships, friends);
Esteem needs (prestige and feelings of accomplishment);
Self-actualization needs (achieving one’s full potential, self-fulfillment).
Maslow believed that all humans aim to fulfill these needs, usually in order from the most basic to the most transcendent, and that these motivations result in the behaviors that make up a personality.

In the 1940s, German-born psychologist Hans Eysenck built off of Jung’s dichotomy of introversion versus extroversion, hypothesizing that there were only two defining personality traits: extroversion and neuroticism. Individuals could be high or low on each of these traits, leading to four key types of personalities.

Eysenck also connected personality to the physical body in a greater way than most earlier psychology researchers and philosophers. He posited that differences in the limbic system resulted in varying hormones and hormonal activation. Those who were already highly stimulated (introverts) would naturally seek out less stimulation while those who were naturally less stimulated (extroverts) would search for greater stimulation.

Eysenck’s thoroughness in connecting the body to the mind and personality pushed the field toward a more scientific exploration of personality based on objective evidence rather than solely philosophical musings.

American psychologist Lewis Goldberg may be the most prominent researcher in the field of personality psychology. His groundbreaking work whittled down Raymond Cattell’s 16 “fundamental factors” of personality into five primary factors, similar to the five factors found by fellow psychology researchers in the 1960s.

The five factors Goldberg identified as primary factors of personality are:

Extroversion

Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Neuroticism
Openness to experience

This five-factor model caught the attention of two other renowned personality researchers, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, who confirmed the validity of this model. This model was named the “Big Five” and launched thousands of explorations of personality within its framework, across multiple continents and cultures and with a wide variety of populations.