In psychology, the big five personality traits are an approach to personality theory. It uses major clusters of personality traits identified by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1987. They arrived with the traits using factor analysis over a list of 35 traits identified by Raymond Cattell, eliminating any traits that correlate directly with one another.
The big five personality traits are as follows:
Later psychologists added other personality traits they believed just as important, believing that they were excluded only because of their lack of synonyms within the English language. These are:
Cattell had obtained his list of traits
by factor analysis of 4500 personality-describing adjectives
identified in the Lexical Hypothesis of
Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert .
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