The Big Five Isn't Enough

What makes a personality system useful?

A good personality system can be used to gain quick and accurate insights into the minds of others. These insights can be used to:

1. Develop a strong story about who you are
2. Make informed decisions in your life
3. Adjust to other people
4. Identify strengths and weaknesses to grow as a person

While the Big Five can fulfil this role for a researcher, it comes at the cost of speed. If you tell me that you are 67th percentile in Neuroticism, I have some idea of what that means if I understand statistics well enough. It does not give me an accurate understanding of who you are as a person and has very practical value. You may be moderate in Neuroticism, but perhaps I do not experience this immediately from interactions and you do not experience life this way. What we miss here is that if you also happen to score 99th percentile in Introversion, that has a profound impact on how you experience the world and how others experience you.

The missing concept: Dominant traits

Our intuition of personality is all about deviations from the normal. A person who is high in Openness stands out to us because this trait is expressed in every aspect of their lives. They are going to a lecture not because of people but because they are interested in ideas. When they talk to you it's not about every day life, but about the concepts behind it. When Openness is dominant it acts as a filter for all experiences.

An individual with a high percentile score in Conscientiousness walks into any room and immediately asks: how organised is this space? Even in the face of abstract information in a lecture, they are wondering why the lecturer said there would be 5 points, but only presented 4.

For those of us not doing Big Five research, personalities are best represented as a ranking of traits.

This ranking can be used to tell a story that is more memorable and useful than raw Big Five data. For example: The Dreamer type has a high percentile score in openness and secondarily they have a low percentile score in Conscientiousness. This pattern is distinct, you know people who are like this because they are unlike other people you have met. They are both abstract and unstructured, and it will be a dominant factor in their lives - they probably didn't cut it in a corporate environment. They are whimsical and most unrealistic, and yet thrive in the beauty of chaos.

When we come to understand people this way, huge insights become easily accessible. Your relationship with your parents might be hard for example because they see life through the lens of low openness, ie. realism and perhaps you are high openness so you want nothing more in life than to float above the clouds, but all of your plans make them uneasy. Your lack of routine and tradition is interpreted to them as a pained existence. When we understand this type of interaction we can communicate our differences and create better cohesion in the home, at work and in education.