Big Five Personality Traits: The 5 Traits Explained

What is the Big Five (OCEAN) model?

The Big Five, or five-factor model, describes personality with five broad dimensions. It grew out of the words people use to describe each other: in 1990, Lewis Goldberg grouped more than 1,400 trait adjectives and found the same five-factor structure across many samples, in both self-ratings and ratings by others.

The traits are often summarized by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

The 5 personality traits

Each trait brings together tendencies that often go together:

• Openness: interest in ideas, imagination, art, and novelty;
• Conscientiousness: organization, persistence, and a sense of responsibility;
• Extraversion: how you approach people, express yourself, and seek stimulation;
• Agreeableness: cooperation, trust, and attention to others;
• Neuroticism: greater sensitivity to negative emotions. Its opposite pole is emotional stability. It is not a condition or a diagnosis.

Dimensions, not types

The Big Five does not sort people into boxes. Each trait is a continuum: you can score higher or lower on each one, and most people fall near the middle. Neither end is good or bad in itself: reserve and extraversion, spontaneity and organization each have strengths depending on the situation.

Does personality change with age?

Partly, yes. A meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples found that, on average, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and social dominance increase, especially between ages 20 and 40. Openness rises in adolescence and tends to decline in old age; agreeableness changes mainly later in life.

What the Big Five can tell you, and its limits

Big Five traits are linked to many life outcomes. A project that replicated 78 of these associations confirmed 87% of them, with effects that were, on average, weaker than in the original studies. These links describe group-level tendencies: they do not predict an individual’s path and do not replace a conversation with a professional.

Our free personality test uses the IPIP-NEO-120, a public-domain questionnaire with 120 questions.