The Big Five personality inventory was developed after psychologists had tried to come up with an integrative taxonomy on how to measure personality based on and related to language (John & Srivastava, 2001). The Big Five’s groundwork was laid by two German psychologists in the earliest attempts to systematically organize the language of personality.
Klages (1926) postulated that a thorough analysis of language can help us understand personality (Digman, 1990). McDougall (1932) had already made the claim that personality may be
analyzed along five separate factors: intellect, character, temperament, disposition, and temper. This foreshadowed the end result of half a century of work to conceive a coherent organization for the language of personality (Digman, 1990). Baumgarten (1933), building on Klages’ research, investigated personality terms, which are frequently found in German. While their research did not leave a notable mark on German research in psychology, it did influence Allport and Odbert (1936) to embark on an examination of language on their own (Digman, 1990; John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988), which, in turn, directly impacted research that followed. After that, researchers repeatedly obtained the Big Five traits by applying factor analysis to a number of lists with personality traits (Cattell, 1943, 1948; Digman, 1990; Fiske, 1949; Tupes &
Christal, 1957, 1961). Various personality traits percolated gradually into the Big Five inventory as it were (Mairesse et al., 2007). A term probably first used by Goldberg (1981), the Big Five comprise Gewissenhaftigkeit ‘conscientiousness’ (self-discipline, organization, and impulse control), Verträglichkeit ‘agreeableness’ (tendency towards cooperation, social harmony, and consideration of others), Neurotizismus ‘neuroticism’ (tendency to experience negative emotions, anxiety, depression, and anger), Offenheit ‘openness’ (reflects imagination, creativity, and
intellectual curiosity), and Extraversion ‘extraversion’ (assertiveness and positive emotionality) (Golbeck, Robles, & Turner, 2011; Goldberg, 1992; John & Srivastava, 2001; Weisberg et al., 2011).
2.5.2 Modern Versions of the Big Five
Several different versions of the Big Five measurement are used today. The most well- known Big Five inventory is the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992; R. McCrae & Costa, 1990), which comprises 240 items. Its short version, the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992), still
comprises 60 items. Yet shorter is the 44-item BFI version of the Big Five measurement (John et al., 1991), which takes around five to ten minutes to complete. As this is still too long for many modern-day research applications, several short versions have been created in an attempt to make the measurement even shorter and economical without sacrificing reliability and validity: the BFI- 25, with 25 items (Benet-Martinez & John, 1998), the BFI-K, which comprises 21 items (Rammstedt & John, 2005), the BFI-S with 15 items (Schupp & Gerlitz, 2008), and the BFI-10 comprising ‘only’ ten items (Rammstedt & John, 2007; Rammstedt et al., 2012). The TIPI is the US version of the German BFI-10 (Gosling et al., 2003). Although the shortest version, the 10- item BFI-10, only takes one minute or less to complete, it mirrors the five-factor structure very well. It not only has great compliance with the overall BFI scale, but even with the extensive NEO-PI-R (240 items), which makes it an economic instrument to measure the Big Five dimensions reliably and with great validity (Rammstedt et al., 2012).
Today, the Big Five inventory is the gold standard for assessing personality traits
(Mairesse et al., 2007); researchers have established the model’s general consistency across age, gender, and cultural lines (John, 1990; R. McCrae & Costa, 1990) as well as its validity across different languages (Digman, 1990; John, 1990; R. McCrae & John, 1992; R. R. McCrae, 1989).
2.5.3 Modern Applications of the Big Five
In the wake of the model’s general acceptance as the go-to measurement tool for personality assessment, many applications have been tested and found valid: Selfhout et al. (2010) showed that there is a link between personality and who one chooses as a friend on Facebook, with extraversion, agreeableness, and openness all correlating with friendship selection. In other areas of social life, the Big Five have been related to romantic relationships, partner choice, level of attachment, and relationship success (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2007; Shaver & Brennan, 1992). Furthermore, the five factors have been connected to individuals’ coping responses, vengefulness, and rumination in the realm of interpersonal conflict (Barrick & Mount, 1993; T. O'Brien & DeLongis, 1996). Beyond social issues and relationships, many studies have tied personality traits, as represented in the Big Five, to a factor that plays a role with peoples’ preferences in music (Rawlings & Ciancarelli, 1997; Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003), who people would be more likely to vote for, McCain or Obama (Jost, West, & Gosling, 2009), differences in the personalities of ‘dog people’ versus ‘cat people’ (Gosling, Sandy, & Potter, 2010; Perrine & Osbourne, 1998), and prediction of a consumer’s preferences for either national or
independent brands (Whelan & Davies, 2006). Furthermore, the Big Five have played a valuable role in professional contexts by establishing their usefulness in personality profiles: while
Hodgkinson and Ford (2008) report that personality traits influence job performance and satisfaction, Barrick and Mount (1993) were able to correlate specific traits with occupational choices and proficiency (Golbeck, Robles, Edmondson, et al., 2011). In addition, the Big Five have been used successfully to predict entrepreneurial status (Zhao & Seibert, 2006), team performance (Neuman, Wagner, & Christiansen, 1999), and counterproductive behavior (Salgado, 2002).
While extraversion has again and again been found to be a reliable predictor for the use of social media among the Big Five traits (Correa et al., 2010), there is more to the issue than its mere face value would suggest. Researchers showed that there are two competing hypotheses that are linked to extraversion and social media usage: the social compensation hypothesis (introverts gain more from social media due to their personality) and the rich-get-richer hypothesis (extroverts transfer their offline sociability to social media) (Correa et al., 2010; Valkenburg & Peter, 2007). The latter seems to go hand-in-hand with a steady rise of narcissism linked to social media usage, especially among adolescents (Twenge, Konrath, Foster, Campbell, & Bushman, 2008). This development has been confirmed in recent research on social media usage and narcissistic online behavior as a function of personality traits (DeWall, Buffardi, Bonser, & Campbell, 2011; Ong et al., 2011).
Popov, Kosinski, Stillwell, and Kielczewski (2017) built an online tool hosted at the University of Cambridge’s psychometrics center, which uses a predictive machine learning model trained on six million social media profiles to predict a user’s Big Five personality profile, along with other personality profiles, and demographic information from their social media footprint on Facebook or Twitter.