Limitations of the Five Factor Personality Test
It is important, when considering a test as prevalent and recognized as the Five Factor Personality Test (based on the Big 5 traits), to consider it’s inherent limitations.
Indeed, there is a broad consensus among personality theorists that this model is the best current description of the structure of personality. With this in mind, we will consider some of the major limitations inherent in this model.
1. The Big 5 traits are too broad. This is arguably the greatest strength and the greatest weakeness of the test. The fact that it measures personality in broad and non-conditional terms make it easy to use, generalizable, and universally relevant. However, this also makes the test subject to inaccuracy — people generally do not naturally use a trait system to describe themselves; rather, they will tend to make conditional statements (e.g., ‘I am very quiet when I have things on my mind’). These subtleties, which capture the finer aspects of a personality, and may very well reflect variation in behaviour from one situation to the next, are omitted in the Five Factor Personality Test.
2. For similar reasons, it is superficial. There is a lot of evidence that one can get a fairly accurate sense of a stranger’s big 5 traits in a single minute. This is why McAdams refers to the test as the ‘psychology of a stranger’. ‘Think about someone who you know really well’, McAdams writes, ‘What is it you know about him or her that you don’t know about other people. Is it traits? Probably not.’
3. The Big 5 traits are only descriptive. While Trait Theory can effectively ‘describe’ a personality, it says nothing about why or how these personalities exist. In a world where self-improvement is a seemingly universal goal, the Five Factor Personality Test is lacking in it’s inability to answer these important questions. ‘Yes, I’m high in neuroticism and I’m 18. But why is that the case, and how can I change it?’
The big 5 traits may be better understood as a rough indication of how a person move’s through their life in terms of social and emotional behaviour. This by no means negates the value of the test: it is still one of the best (or more likely, the best) description of personality structure. This only reminds us, that with the multitude of tests and measurements available, there are many cases when we must not rely solely on the Five Factor Personality Test.
McAdams, D. (1995). What Do We Know When We Know A Person? Journal of Personality, 63(3), 365–396.
