Personality Theories, Five-Factor Model

Kimberly Stark-Wroblewski & Laura Ann Glass

The five-factor model of personality (FFM; often referred to as the Big Five model) is an empirically derived approach that organizes the structure of personality into five broad factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Numerous studies have been conducted on the model and many of these lend support for the existence of the five factors across a wide range of cultures. The five factors have been linked to numerous life outcomes, such as career and relationship trajectories, coping, health-related behaviors, well-being, and maladjustment. The origins of the FFM can be traced to William McDougall's proposal in 1932 that personality could be broadly conceptualized as being composed of five factors. Not long after, in 1934, Louis Leon Thurstone used factor analysis to reduce 60 trait adjectives down to five factors. In 1936 Gordon Allport and H. S. Odbert identified 18,000 terms in an English dictionary that could be ...

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