Going Past the Big Five Personality Traits: More Than Meets the Eye
If you have studied personality psychology or simply have an interest in the field, you have doubtlessly encountered the Big Five personality traits. These traits consist of: extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. While there are unlimited personality variables, when personality tests are administered to samples from around the world, the Big Five traits seem to always show up and as such, the test is the most commonly used tool for personality assessment. But what does it mean when someone behaves incongruously with his or her rating on a specific trait? How stable are we really in our ‘Big Five’s’?
One answer is that the rate of consistency with which you exhibit a given trait is correlated with how central that trait is to you. This has a certain amount of face validity. If I am high on a given trait and I consider it a core aspect of my self, then acting against that trait will result in my experiencing a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, if I possess that trait but it is not (so) central to my self, then behaving in discordance with it will at the very least result in less cognitive dissonance and as such, will enable me to deviate from it more often.
Another factor that has been identified as affecting the consistency of trait-behavior is the concept of self-monitoring. High self-monitors are comparable to ‘chameleons’ in their ability for expressive control, i.e., their ability to decide what trait to express at a given moment.They are both willing and able to present themselves in ways that their audience would prefer — low self-monitors cannot, being both unwilling and unable to present themselves in ways inconsistent with who they feel they are.
On the Self-Monitoring Scale, a high self-monitor would answer ‘true’ to statements such as ‘in different situations with different people, I often act like very different people’ and ‘false’ to statements such as ‘I can only argue ideas I really believe’ (and vice versa for low self-monitors). If you are a high self-monitor, you are very aware of who your audience is and will modify your behavior in accordance. As such, you will be less consistent in expressing your Big Five personality traits then would be your low self-monitoring counterpart.
The Big 5 say a lot, but there is always more than meets the eye. Hopefully we will be learning more and more as we continue to explore and break down the limitations of the Big Five personality traits.
Snyder, Mark. “Self-monitoring Of Expressive Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30.4 (1974): 526–37. Web. 30 Jan. 2015.
Bem, Daryl J., and Andrea Allen. “On Predicting Some Of The People Some Of The Time: The Search For Cross-situational Consistencies In Behavior.” Psychological Review 81.6 (1974): 506–20. Web. 30 Jan. 2015.
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