Member-only story
The Only 5 Personality Traits You Need to Care About
I attended 11 lectures on personality research so you don’t have to.
Over the course of my degree, one of my favourite lecture series was called “Personality & Individual Differences”.
Each week, we’d file into the lecture theatre to learn about the scientific study of personality. History, methods, theories, criticism, evidence, findings, breakthroughs.
Those lectures exposed a lot of myths. Unsurprisingly, most personality tests are scientifically worthless.
(Nods sagely over my “Which Game of Thrones House Do I Belong To?” Buzzfeed quiz.)
All was not lost. In this sea of psuedoscientific corpses, one theory survived the storm of research looking stronger than ever.
This theory is called OCEAN. Also known as the Big Five.
Are we going swimming?
No. Though I’d love to see whatever abomination of a personality test could be made up from swimming styles…yeah, someone already did it.
OCEAN is an acronym for five core personality traits that are talked about, cross-culturally, regardless of cultural or language.
