What's missing from personality factor analysis

Status: draft
Meaningfulness: representative of this blog

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The “Big 5” personality traits—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism—hardly tell you anything about a person. Are they scared of spiders? Will they share your sense of humor? How is their relationship with their mother? Do they like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain? If—on a warm summer day, while you are both laying on the grass, tired and happy from a spontaneous game of ultimate with mutual friends in the park—you were to whisper the right thing in their ear, would they turn to you and for the first time be able to really imagine spending your lives together?

It doesn’t contain some things that I would be the first thing I think of when asked what someone’s like: energetic, wise, competent, witty, sassy, flamboyantly gay. It doesn’t spill anything about archetypes: cat lover, wine snob, mentor, reply guy. Also, some key traits may be highly specific ones: inclination towards living out your philosophy, talent with computers, love of nature; the kinds of thing that definitively shape your life. They wouldn’t show up in Big 5, but are just as apparent from a person’s behavior.

(It’s a further mistake to assume that these five traits are contained within persons in a way that define them across differing circumstances, and even further to assume they are fixed, but psychologists don’t make either of those mistakes, only pop culture does.)

The Big 5 are loosely based on a factor analysis of key personality words across human languages. Some implementation questions arise. Would a language model converge on the same set of personality traits in its internal model of human language? How much of human variability fits along these five axis? How similar do people who score similarly seem, when put next to each other in real life?

Humans seem so complex and varied that reducing personality to five dimensions hardly provides any predictive power or insight into character. Even within one of these traits, take “openness”, what sorts of things are they open to? Where have formative traumas closed off that openness?

Maybe there’s a contrast between what’s most fundamental - and what’s most striking on the surface. But when we want to know about a person, both are necessary.

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