Group - Big Five personality traits

In contemporary psychology, the "Big Five" factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which have been scientifically discovered to define human personality at the highest level of organization (Goldberg, 1993). These five over-arching domains have been found to contain and subsume more-or-less all known personality traits within their five domains and to represent the basic structure behind all personality traits. They have brought order to the often-bewildering array of specific lower-level personality concepts that are constantly being proposed by psychologists, which are often found to be overlapping and confusing. These five factors provide a rich conceptual framework for integrating all the research findings and theory in personality psychology. The big five traits are also referred to as the "Five Factor Model" or FFM (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and as the Global Factors of personality (Russell & Karol, 1994). The Big Five model is considered to be one of the most comprehensive, empirical, data-driven research findings in the history of personality psychology. Identifying the traits and structure of human personality has been one of the most fundamental goals in all of psychology. Over three or four decades of research, these five broad factors were gradually discovered and defined by several independent sets of researchers (Digman, 1990). These researchers began by studying all known personality traits and then factor-analyzing hundreds of measures of these traits (in self-report and questionnaire data, peer ratings, and objective measures from experimental settings) in order to find the basic, underlying factors of personality. At least three sets of researchers have worked independently for decades on this problem and have identified generally the same Big Five factors: Goldberg at the Oregon Research Institute, Cattell at the University of Illinois, and Costa and McCrae at the National Institutes of Health. These three sets of researchers used somewhat different methods in finding the five traits, and thus each set of five factors has somewhat different names and definitions. However, all three sets have been found to be highly inter-correlated and factor-analytically aligned.