What aspects of personality does this tell me about?

There has been much research on how people describe others, and five major dimensions of human personality have been found. They are often referred to as the OCEAN model of personality, because of the acronym from the names of the five dimensions. Here are your results:

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What is the “Big Five”?

Personality psychologists are interested in what differentiates one person from another and why we behave the way that we do. Personality research, like any science, relies on quantifiable concrete data which can be used to examine what people are like. This is where the Big Five plays an important role.

The Big Five was originally derived in the 1970's by two independent research teams — Paul Costa and Robert McCrae (at the National Institutes of Health), and Warren Norman (at the University of Michigan)/Lewis Goldberg (at the University of Oregon) — who took slightly different routes at arriving at the same results: most human personality traits can be boiled down to five broad dimensions of personality, regardless of language or culture. These five dimensions were derived by asking thousands of people hundreds of questions and then analyzing the data with a statistical procedure known as  factor analysis . It is important to realize that the researchers did not set out to find five dimensions, but that five dimensions emerged from their analyses of the data. In scientific circles, the Big Five is now the most widely accepted and used model of personality (though of course many other systems are used in pop psychology and work contexts; e.g., the MBTI).

What do the scores tell me?

In order to provide you with a meaningful comparison, the scores you received have been converted to “percentile scores.” This means that your personality score can be directly compared to another group of people who have also taken this personality test. The percentile scores show you where you score on each personality dimension relative to other people, taking into account normal differences in gender and age.

For example, your Extraversion percentile score is 19, which means that about 19 percent of the people in the comparison sample are less extraverted than you. In other words, you are rather introverted  as compared to them. Keep in mind that these percentile scores are relative to our particular sample of people. Thus, your percentile scores may differ if you were compared to another sample (e.g., elderly British people).

Where can I learn more?

If you'd like to learn more about personality psychology, take a look at  these links  to other personality sites on the web. Take a look at  our homepage  for more tests!

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