Two Cheers for the Big Five!

Abstract

The degree of consensus on the Big Five is remarkable: When before in the history of personality has there been such substantive agreement? Pervin is concerned lest this consensus be overstated and overinterpreted as a major advance in personality as a whole rather than just in a restricted part of the personality domain. He has reason to be concerned. These factors keep recurring in different sets of items and in different languages, and they seem fairly stable over time. The recurrence and stability are important. They give us a bit of fairly solid ground on which to stand as we explore the wetlands of personality. But these are language-embedded folk concepts, as Tellegen (1991) reminded us. And they are only one level in the hierarchy of potential descriptors: Each factor can readily be analyzed into several distinguishable subfactors. These five do not cover many facets of personality that professional psychologists are interested in-goals, current concerns, attitudes, conflicts, anxieties, variabilities, and so forth. They certainly are of little use in understanding a complex personality such as that of Henry Murray as portrayed in the troublesome and startling biography by Robinson (1992). Not only is personality a large and variegated territory or collection of territories, but it is also one that we don't know how to divide into units. How can we conceptualize and study it without knowing what size and kind its pieces should be? The Big Five have their own units-the responses to the rating scales or questionnaires. These units are comparable to but not identical with the units used by other instruments. Granted that there is considerable consensus on the Big Five, granted that we can conclude that personality (or, at least, the perceptions of persons) can be summarized rather well by the Big Five, what is the next step in research in this area? Appropriate questions are: Why 5, and not 3, 7, or 16? Why these five? As Pervin says, the data indicate that something is there-what is it? Goldberg (1981) suggested that these factors are the five pieces of information we need to have when meeting a stranger. Digman (1990) suggested that the five may be related to limitations on human informationprocessing. Taking an evolutionary perspective, Buss (1991) wrote: