Personality Types Are So Yesterday. Do You Know About The 'Big 5' Personality Traits?

There’s a reason why personality tests and personality identifiers, such as Type A, Type B, extroverted and introverted, are so common. Many folks want to know themselves better, and there’s inherent value in learning about yourself.

“The overall hope with so many of these personality assessments is just to understand yourself, to improve self awareness, which hopefully or inevitably, will lead to a lot of personal growth and self-understanding,” said Emma Shandy Anway, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in California. 

“And I think when you are able to increase your emotional intelligence and understanding of yourself, it helps you navigate relationships more and helps you understand how to live your life in a way that’s fully embodied,” she added. 

One major way to understand yourself more deeply is by learning where you fall on the Big Five personality inventory, which is an assessment that allows folks to understand their personality structure by looking at where they fall on a spectrum of five different personality traits. These traits can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism,” said Shandy Anway.

“The research that’s been done on this, they looked at over 50 different cultures, and they found that these five traits are found cross-culturally,“ Shandy Anway added. “It’s kind of a really universal thing that is found and it’s not necessarily just Western cultures that have these.”

Research regarding the Big Five personality traits is ongoing, but it seems that where you fall on each spectrum is part nature and part nurture. Meaning, familial and societal pressures impact your traits, too, noted Anna Lau, a psychiatric nurse practitioner with Lavender Therapy in New York.

Therapists say this a helpful way to know yourself, address traits that you aren’t proud of and continue the ones that you are. Here’s what to know: 

The Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, and they exist on a spectrum. 

These personality traits are on a spectrum, so “each one has a polar opposite,” said Lau.

“Most people fall somewhere in the middle, although, of course, some people are at one side or the other pretty strongly,” Lau added.

Openness to experience

The first is openness to experience. “This one has to do with intellectual curiosity, or even just curiosity in general. Imagination, people who love learning, people who love thinking about problems,” Lau noted. “A lot of times, people who are more on the openness to experience side tend to be highly creative and be able to come up with a lot of original ideas,” Lau said.

The other side of this spectrum is a more close-minded approach, which means a narrower range of interests and a lack of interest in learning about new things, whether that’s art or a different culture, Lau said.

Conscientiousness

The second is conscientiousness. “If we are on the higher end, we’re going to be very focused. We’re going to be very self aware, very aware of the others around us,” said Shandy Anway. Those on the lower end of the spectrum may be less organised, not as aware of their surroundings or the impact of their actions.

Conscientious people are also more committed to school or work goals, Lau said.

Extraversion

The third is extraversion. If you fall high on the extraversion spectrum you likely have a stronger desire to socialise and get your energy from socialisation, said Lau.

“Whereas people who are introverted, they still are able to socialise, they might not love it as much, but it drains them of energy,” Lau noted.

Agreeableness

“Agreeableness is compatibility ... I’m cooperative, I’m empathetic. The lower scores, the other end of the spectrum, is going to be a little bit more of the combative, straightforward, maybe not so agreeable,” said Shandy Anway.

Agreeable people tend to also have more positive beliefs about other people, Lau added, while those who fall lower on the agreeableness scale may have more negative beliefs about others and may be a little less polite. 

Neuroticism

The last personality trait category is neuroticism, which likely means something different from what you expect. “It really has to do with how often we’re experiencing negative emotions. So, people who are really on this spectrum ... are more likely to experience anxiety, sadness, depression, mood swings. These are not just on a clinical level, where they would be diagnosable, they’re just kind of the day to day ‘Oh, I’m worried,’ ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little down,’” explained Lau.

“And so the opposite of this is emotional stability. So, people who are very emotionally stable tend to be more resilient even when they’re facing something more difficult, and so their moods don’t go up and down as much, their anxiety tends to be very manageable,” Lau added.

How can you figure out where you fall in this personality assessment? 

If you’re curious to learn where you are on each personality spectrum, there are a few resources you can look to for guidance (and you may even already have a gut sense of your personality categories).

This assessment is more in-depth than your run-of-the-mill personality quiz, which makes talking about this to your therapist a good idea. Not all therapists are equally receptive to these kinds of personality tests though, noted Shandy Anway, but if it’s something you’re interested in, it’s something your therapist should be willing to talk you through.

Plus, chances are, some of these traits have already come up in your work with your therapist, said Lau. Maybe you are already working on being too agreeable, for example. Or, perhaps you are trying to become more emotionally stable.

Understanding where you fall is “a perfect conversation to have with a therapist to figure out how do you build self-awareness about that trait and how do you understand it so that you can make different choices behaviourally, or even practice how to respond to things differently,” Lau said.

That being said, there are online quizzes you can take such as the Big Five Inventory, said Shandy Anway, but it’s ideal to take these results to a mental health professional so they can help you parse through them.

Here’s why it can be valuable to understand your personality traits.

Understanding where you fall on each personality continuum is a good way to know yourself better, and more fully grasp how and why you handle certain situations the way you do.

“These assessments are helpful, like I said, because they increase the sense of self-understanding and self-awareness,” said Shandy Anway.

“There is value to understanding where we fall on these because we can understand our baseline, and that can be helpful,” added Lau. “Like, if my baseline is highly anxious, very reactive to things, then I can give myself some understanding for that instead of feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m so mad at myself, I’m always so anxious,’” she noted.

“Personality type is partly something we’re born with, and partly something that we learn from our culture and our family, and it’s not really like our fault ... it’s not something that we can blame ourselves for,” she said, “and that’s where understanding it better can be super helpful because we can stop blaming ourselves for some of this stuff.”

If you do find that you tend to be, say, more anxious or less open than you’d like, you can work to change it.

“Remember, that’s the beauty of this — it can empower you to change if you want to change ... if you get a result that freaks you out, it’s not permanent,” noted Shandy Anway.

“And that’s really a lot of what we do in therapy, right? Like, we understand our natural patterns and we see if there’s something we want to change,” Lau added.

This deeper personality understanding and any ensuing changes can help you navigate life better, and live a life that aligns with you best.