The Big Five Personality Model: An Empirical Tool for Understanding Yourself
It goes a long way to determining who you are, the choices you make, and how well you do in life.
The Story of Personality Theory
Some 80-plus years ago researchers embarked on one of the longest (and most boring) projects in human psychology. It started with the idea that people are born with different character traits that remain relatively stable throughout one’s lifetime.
They called this idea personality.
To test this hypothesis one researcher began by picking up a dictionary and highlighting any word he could find related to human behaviour. After putting this list together, another researcher (presumably because the first one killed himself out of boredom) took that list and started to categorise these words into overarching traits.
Unfortunately he also killed himself, so another bunch of researchers took over and began the painstaking job of measuring these traits on a large number of people over a very long period of time.
The researchers who managed not to kill themselves (God bless) started narrowing this list down by binning any trait that fluctuated too much. Eventually, the list got smaller…
