How big is the Big 5 really?
The only person who knows you better than yourself is probably your mom, as we all say, but that still doesn’t stop people from drawing conclusions about who you are based on their first impressions. Heck, we do it all the time, sometimes without even being really aware of it. We might think to ourselves; “awh this person is so sweet and kind” or “wow that person is all over the place”!
These are some of the traits that the Big 5 personality tests measure. More specifically, the Big 5 looks at Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (a.k.a OCEAN). However, can we actually be certain that this test is actually testing what it really says it’s supposed to, and how subjective is it really?
Just the other day, I decided to take the test myself to see how I ranked on every spectrum of the test. Low and behold, I wasn’t too shabby. We already have a sense of where we think we should fall on the spectrum, and where other people who we think we know quite well should fall too.
To say the least, I wasn’t disappointed with my scores. It resembles quite well what I had envisioned myself scoring. However, when I handed my computer over to my friend after I had completed my test to see how they scored, their score was considerably similar to mine. The person first of all is 1) younger than me, 2) of the opposite sex and 3) not at all into the same things as I am!
What struck me the most about my friends score was their ranking on Openness to experience. This friend LOVES doing different things, and has never had a set routine. They kind of live in the moment and go with the flow of things. Trying something new is pretty much what they live off, and yet, on this version of the Big 5 personality test, they scored in the 47th percentile, and apparently “don’t seek out new experiences”.
This got me thinking about how valid these online tests are that we see nowadays? Do they actually give us a complete understanding of who the person really is? Or is it merely just a glimpse of what this person is really like? Perhaps it was just the questions that were included in this version that were misleading, or weren’t tailored specifically enough to address one of the personality traits. After all there are many variations of this test, so perhaps another test would have provided different results and would have ranked him as “high” on openness.
So many other factors and traits make up who we are, that simply basing our judgments on one test isn’t sufficient for addressing questions that linger in our minds. The Big 5 traits can be individually broken down into 6 further facets, which therefore makes 30 traits you could test a person on. To get the whole picture figured out, more than one system of testing a person should typically be used.
On the contrary, if the test is really giving an accurate rating of each individual who completes it, it’s amazing to see how different some people are perceived to be, but yet how similar these people are when they are rating themselves on the spectrum. One of the ways to get an aggregated rating of a person is to get the person to complete the test, and get another person who knows them well to fill out the same test. If the two tests correlate, then there is evidence that the person might be extroverted if they score higher on the extroversion spectrum. However, if there is no correlation between the two test scores, than the data says something else; the way we perceive ourselves isn’t necessarily the way the world perceives us. In the end, as I’ve mentioned, the only person who knows us better then ourselves is probably our moms!
Now, I’m not saying the Big 5 test isn’t a measure we shouldn’t use. On the contrary! The Big 5 test is a test that can give you first hand knowledge about a person. It can enlighten your senses about someone. However, final conclusions shouldn’t be drawn from just this one test. A person is more than just one OCEAN.
