what is the 'big 5' personality test used for?

[sbw]

and why did they steal the name of the college basketball tournament in philadelphia?

Scott

[panda]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_five_personality_traits

[sbw]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_five_personality_traits

I actually read that already (indirectly proving my implied laziness)

maybe I missed something but I didnt find any sort of like comparison or application stuff

Scott

[lbloom]

.
A person's ratings on the five factors has been found to change with time, with mean levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness increasing, while Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness generally decrease as a person ages.

[Nightning]

I actually read that already (indirectly proving my implied laziness)

maybe I missed something but I didnt find any sort of like comparison or application stuff

Scott

*cough* Strictly from a "scientific" point of view. Psychologist found the Big 5 personality factors are superior to MBTI/Jungian types in terms of predicting behavior. Therefore it's heavily used in research setting because correlations/consistency is important.

[SolitaryWalker]

*cough* Strictly from a "scientific" point of view. Psychologist found the Big 5 personality factors are superior to MBTI/Jungian types in terms of predicting behavior. Therefore it's heavily used in research setting because correlations/consistency is important.


Remember MBTI is not concerned with human behavior, or lives of individuals or human personalities.

It just investigates temperaments, as if they were in a normal state. MMPI is the test to take if you want your personal behavior, your personality and you yourself as an individual assessed.

This is why I take an impersonal approach to MBTI. It deals not with people, but with imagined normal temperaments, it does not take the human element and possible abnormalities into consideration.

[Helios]

I personally find MBTI/Jung much more insightful than Big 5. However, Big 5 gives, a great measure of my external persona. Which I iamgine is perfect from a bussiness POV.

[obe1]

Big 5 starts from the occurrance of adjectives in descriptions in a certain class of languages. So, as I see it, the OCEAN descriptions of personality are about how people *are perceived to be from the outside*.

Jung was a psychiatrist, working largely from a viewpoint of identification with the patient, so his theory is much more about how people should look at themselves from the inside, or how their therapists should look at them from the patient's own perspective.

The MBTI people have largely been about understanding your own reaction to a given job/life-situation/etc. and about finding empathy with those who are different. This is again about getting inside someone else's head (the person you might be in a given situation, or the person you cannot interact with well.)

What is really cool to me is that the two systems map together almost completely. Each factor in the Big 5 appears to map easily onto one of the axes implicit in Jung's model.

The MBTI omits one aspect of Jung's theory, the notion of Itegration, as it seemed too clinical and judgemental for personal use, and because it should change across time, so it may not seem like an aspect of personality. It indicates how well the functions have learned to get along. At one extreme are highly integrated people who can move around or cancel out parts of their personalities that cause difficulty (a goal for Jung, but not always a good thing in my opinion), at the other are folks with strong and rigid personalities that only cope with complex dynamics by forcing situations to change (not always a bad thing in my opinion.)

To map the two systems together, we need to denote it, so I would introduce this as a fifth dimension along side NS TF IE PJ, call it CD -- C for Concordant and D for Discordant or C for Coordinated vs D for Distinctive, if we want to be nice.

OK then the dimensions of the Big 5 seem to me to fit like this:

Open measures NP (open) vs JS (conservative)
Conscientious measures IJ (careful) vs EP (free-wheeling)
Extraverted measures EF (engaging) vs IT (internal)
Agreeable measures FC (agreeable) vs TD (off-putting)
Neurotic measures ND (idiosyncratic) vs SC (adaptive)

It makes sense to me that the externally perceived traits indicate axes along which disagreements are common.

The cool contribution of the five-factor theory is that it puts the dimensions in an order, with the adjacent (in a circle) dimensions being more closely related.

So this indicates an order like this for the Jungian functions: NS, JP, EI, TF, CD, with the adjacent dimensions somehow more easily connected than the ones farther apart. What meaning might this have for the Jungian theory?

[Uberfuhrer]

Obe1 has taught us well.

[MarkHall]

A big five personality test (http://personality-testing.info/tests/BIG5.php) is actually more scientifically valid than the MBTI.

[Miranda]

To map the two systems together, we need to denote it, so I would introduce this as a fifth dimension along side NS TF IE PJ, call it CD -- C for Concordant and D for Discordant or C for Coordinated vs D for Distinctive, if we want to be nice.

OK then the dimensions of the Big 5 seem to me to fit like this:

Open measures NP (open) vs JS (conservative)
Conscientious measures IJ (careful) vs EP (free-wheeling)
Extraverted measures EF (engaging) vs IT (internal)
Agreeable measures FC (agreeable) vs TD (off-putting)
Neurotic measures ND (idiosyncratic) vs SC (adaptive)



A correlational study between MBTI and the NEO-PI indicates a simpler mapping.

Extraversion -> EI (0.7)
Openness -> SN (0.7)
Agreeableness -> TF (0.5)
Conscientiousness -> JP (0.5) (also correlates with SN, but then JP correlates with SN)
Neuroticism -> no major correlation, but very slight towards I and F. (0.1)

This shows strong convergent validity between two systems from completely different sources (ie. MBTI from Jungian theory and Big 5 from empirical research). I think this is pretty impressive.