Cattell's Big Five Factors

Cattell's Big Five Factors

Cattell’s Big Five Factors of Personality, Behavioral Genetics, and Evolutionary Personality Theory.

Current Research

Raymond Cattell (1905-present) designed the “Big five Factors of Personality”, in which five classifications are revealed. Big Five factors: #1 extraversion vs. introversion, #2 agreeableness vs. antagonism, #3 conscientiousness vs. undirected ness, #4 neuroticism vs. emotional stability, and #5 openness to experience vs. not open to experience. Han’s Eysenck’s and Sir Francis Galton behavior genetics research and Arnold Buss’ three concerns for evolutionary personality theory coinsided with each other.

The Big five represents a catalog of traits that some personality psychologists suggest capture the essence of individual differences in personality. Raymond Cattell used Allport and Odbert’s 4500 trait-descriptives in which he extracted 35 traits. After others continued to analyze these factors and found congruence with the ratings, that eventually became the Big five Factors of Personality. In order to fully understand the origin of these factors an outline for factor analysis must be explained.

Factor analysis studies where conducted and the results where used in an analysis technique generally done with computers to determine meaningful relationships and patterns in behavioral data. Beginning with a large number of behavioral variables, the computer finds relationships or natural connections where variables are maximally correlated with one another and minimally correlated with other variables, and then it groups the data accordingly. After this process has been repeated many times a pattern of relationships or certain factors that capture the essence of all the data appears (Pervin & John 1999). The same process used to determine the Big Five Personality factors; copious amounts of different researchers that have done numerous tests and they all agree that the “Big five Factors” are the only consistently reliable factors that have been found.

Big Five factors include: #1 extraversion vs. introversion, #2 agreeableness vs.

antagonism, #3 conscientiousness vs. undirected ness, #4 neuroticism vs. emotional stability, and #5 openness to experience vs. not open to experience, these breakdown into understandable terms. #1 Extraversion implies an energetic approach to the social and material wo...

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...between human nature and individual characteristics? He also acknowledged three criteria from evolutionary biology for determining a characteristic as a part of human nature. These are: it must be universal. Must be “innate, unconditioned, and relatively difficult to modify” (p.1139). And lastly it must have an adaptive function (Lindsey and Campbell p. 352,1998).

In conclusion, all of these theories have laid the groundwork for mapping complex human behavior. It is still unclear when and how much of our personalities/traits come from genetics and how much is influenced by outside factors. Many believe you must learn of your past in order to succeed in the future, but understanding how we became what we are today is of equal importance. With the advances in technology, DNA/Genetics who knows what answers the future will hold for us.

References

Hall, C., Lindzey, G., Campbell, J. (1998). Theories of Personality (4th ed.) (pp.343-356) John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Pervin, L. & John, O. (Eds) (1999). Handbook of Personality: theory and research. New York: Gilford.

Potkay, C. & Allen, B (1986). Personality: Theory, research, and applications.

California: Brooks/Cole.