Big Five Personality Traits

Perception can cloud our judgment, skew our notion of reality and warp our understanding of who we really are. To burrow beneath the flesh and bones that form our physical image we have to take an objective look into our spirit. As the misunderstood hero in the movie Shrek stated to his donkey companion during their journey to rescue the princess “an ogre has many layers” and it’s time for us to peel back the layers that cover up our personality—the core of our being.

Personality can be referred to as consistency in behaviour and how we react to events and situations. Debate continues regarding the degree to which our personality is determined by nature (heredity and genetics) or environmental factors such as culture, family, group membership, and life experiences (nurture). In addition to these two factors, a third dimension of personality focuses upon the interplay between the situation and the individual. Although, one’s personality tends to be stable and consistent—under different situations a particular aspect of an individual’s personality can dominate the behaviour of a person. For example, a non-violent individual placed in a life-threatening situation will probably become quite violent in order to survive. These three dimensions of personality (heredity, nurture, and the situation) form a complex web that drives our behaviour and provides important clues to examining our inner being.

The “Big Five” personality factors approach reduces the number of traits that are utilized to explain behaviour. According to this theory, an individual’s personality is encapsulated along a continuum derived from five primary factors (adjustment, sociability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and intellectual openness).

It should be noted that personality traits are not only assessed via self-report inventories (though that is indeed the most common way of assessing them). Observation, situational tests, projective techniques and even objective measures can also serve as measures of personality, albeit not explicitly. The most commonly used forms of observation in personnel selection are interviews and biodata. Employers may not explicitly state that what they are assessing in an interview or looking for in biodata is indeed traces of personality, but there is longstanding evidence for the fact that candidates’/interviewees’ personality traits affect