The Big 5 Personality Traits, OCEAN

in this video we're going to start to learn about personality by going over one of the most widely used popular and best ways of understanding and conceptualizing people's personalities the big five personality traits represented by this acronym ocean but before i tell you about the big five personality traits and ocean let me just provide a simple definition of personality in psychology when we talk about personality we're talking about an individual's characteristics emotional responses thoughts and behaviors so lots of different things that are relatively stable over time so not so much the moment-to-moment emotions but generally

across time and space so the big five personality traits before i tell you what they are let me just tell you a little bit about what this approach is and what it looks like so as you know it's a trait approach so we have five different traits that we categorize people but it's not so much a categorical approach it's a dimensional approach meaning even within a given trait it's not like you have that trait or you don't in contrast you can be on a spectrum you can have a lot of this trait or a little

bit of this trait or very very very little of this trait you know what i mean so this is what we mean when we say it's a dimensional trait approach to understanding and quantifying people's personalities and it seeks to boil down personality to its elemental parts that is these five key dimensions these five key traits that we believe in psychology can describe all sorts of different aspects of people and relates to all sorts of real behaviors and real world outcomes that we care about so let me tell you what they are remember the acronym ocean

here's the o openness to new experiences and i'm just going to name them for now before i get to a few specifics about each in future slides the c stands for conscientiousness the e stands for extroversion the a stands for agreeableness and finally the end in ocean neuroticism so let me tell you about all of these in turn starting with openness which is just a tendency to enjoy new experiences and ideas some people refer to this as open-mindedness which focuses more on the ideas aspect but new experiences as part of this whole openness dimension as

well now what are some things that relate to this what are some qualities or some aspects of openness well openness in terms of wanting to experience new things feel new things engage in new sorts of behaviors your openness to different kinds of ideas that maybe aren't consistent with your own pre-existing ideas these are all a part of openness high scores and openness so there's actually a you know basically a multiple choice test you can take online the big five personality inventory that will rank you in all these dimensions and give you uh sort of where

you fall on the spectrum so high scores on this openness spectrum tend to be you know people who are really curious who have a wide range of interests and who are independent and a quote that sort of characterizes this if you resonate with this you might be high in openness who knows what awesome things i have yet to experience this is a very high openness sort of statement now low openness scores sort of define people who are very practical they're sort of conventional and they prefer their routines rather than trying new things if i know

what i like why would i change it if it ain't broke why fix it this is a low openness kind of thing it's like me and my wife i am very much low openness when it comes to food for example if we go to a restaurant i want to get the same thing that i know that i enjoy in contrast my wife wants to always try something new and she's very high in openness in this way so next is conscientiousness the sea in ocean this is sort of your sense of duty your discipline and your

orderliness not necessarily cleanliness per se but uh that might be in this whole conscientiousness dimension if you're a very clean and organized person chances are you're also very conscientious so associated with conscientiousness things like competence self-discipline being really thoughtful having very clear goals that you try and go for all the time somebody who's high in conscientiousness is very hard working very dependable and very organized now conscientiousness is a great thing in terms of the correlations we find with other important outcomes that we care about people who are high in conscientiousness tend to live longer perhaps

because they're conscientious about their health and exercising things like that people who are high in conscientiousness tend to do very well in work and school get good grades they do well in their academics and they tend to have better and longer lasting marriages in contrast people who are low in conscientiousness tend to be more impulsive they can be a little bit careless at times and much more disorganized and this is associated with risky and even criminal behavior at times now that's not to say you're going to be a criminal if you're low in conscientiousness these

are just correlations that we need to think about extroversion is the tendency to seek stimulation and company and i'm going to give you a couple of caveats in a minute about extraversion because i think the way that extroversion is used and understood in society is fundamentally a little bit flawed so we'll talk about that in a moment extroversion is associated with things like sociability being really assertive and your tendency to express your emotions people who score very high in extroversion which is to say they're extroverts tend to be very outgoing very warm and sort of

have this openness-like quality but it's a little different they like to seek adventure they're very stimulation seeking now they tend to be energized these extroverts tend to be energized by social interaction and sensory stimulation in contrast people who score low on this extroversion dimension which is to say that they're introverted tend to be more quiet more reserved and a little bit more withdrawn they get their energy from being alone from having some quiet time and instead of being energized by sensory stimulation they can they can find this over stimulation a little bit exhausting and i

want to just make really clear that introversion is not shyness that's how it's commonly used in our society being introverted doesn't mean you're shy or it doesn't mean you're socially inept it doesn't mean you don't have social abilities this is a common misconception extroverts can be pretty shy and introverts can be personable and very talkative the distinction is in what fuels you if you're introverted being alone will fuel you and give you energy if you're extroverted being around other people going to a party these kinds of things will give you energy that's the main distinction

now let's talk about agreeableness the a in ocean this is the degree to which you are willing to upset other people so agree agreeableness is associated with things like being cooperative being trustworthy and being good-natured and if you score high in agreeableness you tend to be more helpful toward other people more trusting and trustworthy more empathetic as well so these people now there's a upside and a downside to all of these really even though it may not sound like it may sound like being agreeable is just the best thing ever and yes you're more you're

more friendly you're more compassionate that's all well and good but there are downsides which you can see here people who are very agreeable tend to avoid conflict often at their own expense which sometimes conflict is healthy right sometimes you need to raise concerns and raise issues to move past them and if you're just willing to you know say okay i'm wrong even if you're not in some circumstances that can be a little bit self-defeating and a little bit bad in the long run now people who are low in agreeableness tend to be more critical a

little bit less cooperative and perhaps even suspicious of other people and again good sides and and bad sides to this bad sides i guess are that people who are very disagreeable tend to be callous and harsh but the good side is that they're also very resolute in their beliefs they're often willing to sort of fight for what they believe in and that's awesome as well now let's talk about neuroticism which is the tendency to experience and express unpleasant emotions so the tendency toward unstable emotions like anxiety and depression and things like that so people who

score very high in this neuroticism dimension tend to be pretty anxious relatively unhappy and pretty prone to negative emotions and they might have great fluctuations in their moods now the downside to being high in neuroticism is that it's associated with psychopathology which is to say psychological disorders such as anxiety disorders and mood disorders which obviously you want to avoid as much as possible and we see this correlation here people who score very low in neuroticism tend to be pretty calm they tend to be even tempered and more secure especially emotionally secure now how do these

traits differ how do they change across the lifespan well they can change across the lifespan there is as we'll talk about in a future video a genetic component to personality that is very strong but that's not to say that you can't change your personality we find that these traits are fairly volatile before age 30 and they change quite a bit but that they're relatively stable after age 50. now what does the trajectory look like as people get older not everybody but on average what we find is that agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to increase whereas the

other three traits tend to decrease so openness extraversion and neuroticism tend to decrease now what about cultural differences we do find that the big five personality traits are very consistent across many cultures the data we have suggests that this is a fairly universal way of looking at personality but some researchers have found that other cultures may have additional traits beyond these five that are very core to their cultural identity for example in china the chinese tradition which is defined by an emphasis on saving face and preserving harmony this is a very important trait and quality

for a person to have and also in northeastern europe honesty and humility so again we have some cultural variations but this is for the most part a very universal way of looking at personality now i want to end by just talking about a couple of the pros and cons to this kind of an approach to understanding personality a trait approach well we have a few pros here number one one nice thing about uh trait approaches like the big five personality inventory is that they're constructed empirically which is to say from observable data we can collect

data on these dimensions and it's not just that we're sitting in our armchairs as psychologists and thinking you know trying to guess what people differ and what aspects of personality there might be these are data-driven dimensions that we can observe so it's very objective rather than subjective another nice thing is that traits that we're seeing here are predictive of behaviors and outcomes that we care about and i hinted at this a few times talking about how conscientiousness is associated with good grades and it's associated with marital stability these are things these are outcomes that we

really care about and so there's actual power there's something really useful about knowing where people fall in these dimensions because it relates to real world things now there are some cons number one uh these sort of trade approaches tend to focus on uh self-report methods which means you sit down as i hinted at before and you take a multiple choice test and that determines where you fall and this has limitations because people can fake responses for example they can try and look more conscientious than they actually are sort of maliciously but also people tend to

be driven to respond in a way that's consistent with how they want to be rather than how they actually are and so if you want to be really extroverted even if you're really not you may respond in more extroverted ways on the test and again that might skew how you're portrayed that might skew your results in a way that's not really accurate that's not really consistent with your true personality and finally this is less of a con than just a natural limitation of this kind of approach a trait approach tells us the structure of personality

what traits there are and what that looks like it doesn't tell us much about the causes where does personality come from now we will talk about this later however so stay tuned for that