The Big Five personality traits

Over the last few decades, a new model of personality, known as “the Big Five” or the “Five-Factor Model” (FFM), has emerged as the dominant model used by personality psychologists. In many ways, it is a compromise between the Eysencks’

model, which is seen by many researchers to be comprised of too few traits, and Cattell’s model, which is seen by many researchers to be comprised of too many traits.

Although the Big Five traits were not widely known or widely used until the 1990’s, they were actually first “discovered” in the 1950’s by U.S. Air Force researchers Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal. Through a group of studies that looked for correlations between Cattell’s personality traits, Tupes and Christal concluded that the traits could actually be reduced to just five, which they labelled surgency,

agreeableness, dependability, emotional stability, and culture. They reported their findings in a 1961 government report, which remained largely unknown to other personality researchers until it was re-published much later in the Journal of Personality (Tupes & Christal, 1992), after the Big Five had been discovered independently.

The “re-discovery” of the Big Five traits is generally credited to Lewis Goldberg of the University of Oregon and the recent popularization of the model is generally credited to Paul Costa and Robert McCrae of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Like Cattell, Goldberg searched for personality traits using lexical studies but unlike previous researchers, he started from scratch with new sets of descriptive words. The result was a five-factor solution very similar to the one found by Tupes and Christal (Goldberg, 1990). He coined the term “the Big Five” and used the same labels as Tupes and Christal with the exception of the label dependability, which he renamed conscientiousness. He then shared his work with the team of Costa and McCrae, developers of the NEO personality inventory. Costa and McCrae’s model of personality was originally based on only three traits (neuroticism, extraversion and openness – hence the acronym “NEO”) but was later expanded to include

agreeableness and conscientiousness, thus matching the Big Five (neuroticism being the reverse of emotional stability and openness being similar to culture). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992a), was developed to include the additional two traits and to this day remains the primary psychometric instrument for measuring the Big Five personality traits.

In the current Big Five model, extraversion (originally called surgency) is characterized by a tendency to be energetic, assertive, and sociable; neuroticism is characterized by a tendency to be anxious, irritable, and depressed; openness (originally called culture) is characterized by a tendency to be intellectual curious,

appreciative of art, and interested in novelty; agreeableness is characterized by a tendency to be trusting, cooperative, and compassionate; and conscientiousness is characterized by a tendency to be organized, dependable, and self-disciplined.

There are six major benefits of the Big Five model. The first is that it corresponds well to both the Eysencks’ model and Cattell’s model and in a sense, combines them (see Table 6 below). It carries forward the traits of extraversion and neuroticism from Eysenck and splits psychoticism into agreeableness and

conscientiousness. The only real addition is openness (which Hans Eysenck argued is simply a rough measure of intelligence). On the other hand, the model is based on lexical studies, like Cattell’s model. Further research into Cattell’s sixteen personality factors has demonstrated, as Tupes and Christal suggested, that there do indeed exist five “higher order” traits alongside the primary sixteen. Cattell and his wife Heather (who carried on his work after his death) ended up referring to these as the “five global factors” or “supertraits”. Roughly speaking, factors A, F, H, N and Q2 correspond to extraversion; factors C, O and Q4 correspond to neuroticism (labelled

“anxiety” by the Cattells); factors E and L correspond to agreeableness (the reverse of which was labelled “independence” by the Cattells); factors I, M and Q1 correspond to openness (labelled “receptivity” by the Cattells); and factors G and Q3 correspond to conscientiousness (labelled “self control” by the Cattells). The only factor that does not correspond to any of the Big Five is factor B.

The second benefit of the Big Five model is that it is demonstrably very robust. It has been applied in other languages and cultures and has been found to exist in every part of the world. According to Gosling and John (1999), differences in the Big Five traits have even been found to exist in several non-human animals, including chimpanzees (all five traits), dogs (all except openness), and octopi (extraversion and neuroticism only).

The third benefit of the Big Five model is that it has been expanded by Costa and McCrae to include subordinate dimensions, called “facets”. Each of the Big Five traits is associated with six facets, resulting in a total of 30 facets (see Table 6). This allows the theory to be applied to more specific behaviours. Several of these facets will be used in the current project to operationalize concepts addressed in chapter three, namely immorality, arrogance, anger, deliberation and intelligence.

The fourth benefit of the Big Five model is that a public domain version of the NEO PI-R has been developed by Lewis Goldberg and his colleagues. Known as the IPIP-NEO, the instrument measures both the Big Five traits and Costa and McCrae’s 30 facets. As explained in chapter eight, the current project will make use of this instrument to measure several of the facets thought to relate to atheism.

The fifth benefit of the Big Five model is that four of the Big Five personality traits have been demonstrated to correlate strongly with the four dimensions of psychological type theory (Costa & McCrae, 1989). As summarized in Table 6 below, a preference for extraversion (E) correlates with high scores on Big Five extraversion, and a preference for introversion (I) correlates with low scores on Big Five

extraversion. A preference for sensing (S) correlates with low scores on openness, and a preference for intuition (N) correlates with high scores on openness. A preference for thinking (T) correlates with low scores on agreeableness, and a

preference for feeling (F) correlates with high scores on agreeableness. A preference for judging (J) correlates with high scores on conscientiousness, and a preference for perceiving (P) correlates with low scores on conscientiousness. These correlations allow researchers to make direct comparisons between studies that have used psychological type theory and studies that have used the Big Five model.

Table 6: The Big Five Personality Traits

Type Theory E versus I* S* versus N T* versus F J versus P*

* Reverse trait label

The sixth benefit of the Big Five model is that it has been used in many studies related to personality and religion. Saroglou (2010) did a meta-analysis of these studies comprised of 71 different samples from 19 countries (n = 21,715), and found that two of the Big Five traits – agreeableness and conscientiousness – correlate consistently with measures of religiousness. This finding was consistent across age, gender, nationality, religious measure used, and Big Five instrument used. This finding confirms both the connection between the Eysencks’ psychoticism and religiosity (psychoticism being a possible combination of agreeableness and

conscientiousness) and the connection between a preference for FJ (feeling and judging) and religiosity (feeling being correlated with agreeableness and judging with conscientiousness).

Although the Big Five model has many benefits, there is one major weakness that makes it unsuitable to serve as the main model of personality used for the current project: Like the Eysencks’ model, it uses labels that are extremely value-laden and easily perceived as perjorative. Since the words “openness”, “agreeableness”, and

“conscientiousness” all carry very positive connotations, scoring low on these traits can be seen as negative. Likewise, since “neuroticism” carries a very negative connotation, scoring high on this trait can also be seen as negative. The only trait label in the Big Five model that is value-free is extraversion. On the other hand, psychological type theory uses dichotomous terms that are all value-free. For example, by using the terms “thinking” and “feeling” instead of high agreeableness and low agreeableness, it is easier to point out the fact that both sides have strengths and that both sides have weaknesses. This is particularly important when dealing with a sensitive topic like religion. It is for this reason that the current project has chosen to use psychological type theory as its main model for exploring the role that

personality might play in why certain people give up belief in God and become atheists.