THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS
The big five personality traits are used as a fast and dirty method to outline someone’s overall personality and perhaps predict their behaviour in the field of psychology. This psychological method I think shows some flaws in it’s attempts to subject everyone to the same standards. The five dimensions include neuroticism, openness, conscientousness, extraversion and agreeableness. Each individual is rated along a dimension on each of these dimensions to achieve some sort of outline of the type of person this person really is. There are two problems here, first the application of a dimension allows no room for withdrawal completely from that dimension. The other problem is the subjectivity that comes with the choice of these particular five dimensions as the ultimately defining characteristics of personality. It simply cannot come down to these five traits and their continuums… because to me there is an infinite amount of variability when it comes to personality that it cannot be contained to these restrictive standards.
I am someone who loves to assess people, being a student of psychology on top of it, I find the big 5 very interesting. Rating people along these 5 dimensions may provide just enough information on someone’s personality but even then I would not say it is reliable or should be taken objectively. The big 5 ultimately ends up trickling down to subtraits of each major dimension which to me only seems to complicate things. When encountering someone it would seem so restricting to subject them first to these 5 dimensions and then from those results subject them to even more interpretation off of those dimensions. The task seems not only tedious but very limiting. The problem with this method is that it boxes in the field of pyschology rather than allowing for the open interpretation which I think is crucial to understanding the vast variey of personalities there are to be encountered.
The big 5 tries to objectify a purely subjective matter. Personality evaluation should not be confined within the restraints of 5 dimensions — look at all the different and unique type of people there are in the world.
