Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about
the work of Raymond Cattell and his 16 personality factors. I also mentioned the work of Hans Eysenck
and his attempt to narrow personality down to just two or three dimensions. But in this
video we're gonna look at what's probably the most commonly used approach for thinking about traits
and personality today. This is the five factor model also known as the Big Five, and this mostly
comes from the work of Robert McCrae and Paul Costa. So here's a picture of Robert McCrae here,
and here's a picture of Paul Costa, and what McCrae and Costa did was in 1978 they created a
trait assessment that looked at three main traits and these were neuroticism, extraversion, and
openness to experience. And they later modified this to look at five main traits and so in 1990
they created an assessment called the NEO PI-R. Now the NEO initially referred to neuroticism,
extraversion, and openness to experience but it's no longer an acronym because now it's referring to
five traits. And then we have PI-R; personality inventory and R for revised. So what's on this
NEO PI-R? Well, this consists of 240 items and the way that it works is a person looks at each
item and they respond to it using what's called a Likert scale. And so a Likert scale is a scale
with five possible responses and these range from strongly disagree to disagree to neutral to agree
and then strongly agree. So you'd look at each of these statements relating to personality and
you decide how much you think that matches your own personality. Do you agree with that
statement? Do you strongly disagree with that statement? Do you strongly agree? Are you fairly
neutral? And so by going through the 240 items and using this Likert scale for each of them,
you'd come up with where you fall on each of these five main factors. So what are the five factors
that we're looking at? Well one of these is what's called openness to experience and so this refers
to someone's curiosity, their willingness to try new things, and have new experiences and it may
even be related with their intelligence. Now, next we have conscientiousness and so conscientiousness
refers to a person's tendency to follow through, to get things done, right? They feel a sense of
responsibility for things and they also tend to have a higher level of carefulness. Next we
have extraversion and this refers to how outgoing somebody is, their level of sociability. And it
can also refer to social aspects like their level of confidence or their level of social dominance.
Next we have agreeableness and agreeableness refers to someone's willingness to cooperate
and compromise with other people. So it could also include their sense of loyalty or trust in others,
and their desire to maintain good social relationships. And lastly we
have neuroticism and so neuroticism refers to someone's level of emotional instability,
or their tendency towards anxiety. Now the idea, as I said, is you would go through the assessment
and this would tell you where you stand on each of these five dimensions, right? So this would
give you your unique personality profile. So we go through and say okay where do you fall on openness
to new experiences? Maybe you're a little bit higher on that and then your conscientiousness,
maybe you're very conscientious, and maybe you're not particularly extroverted,
and maybe you're you know sort of right in the middle for agreeableness, or low in neuroticism,
right? So you'd go through and we'd see where you fall on each of these different dimensions.
Now you'll also notice here a nice mnemonic for remembering these five factors which is OCEAN.
That can remind you openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Now
these labels that were using for each of these factors are up for debate and so that's something
that we can keep in mind is that, it's important to remember that each of these factors of course
refers to many things. That's what a factor does. In factor analysis we pull out something that
refers to many items and so we might think that maybe the term "conscientiousness" isn't the best
term to describe all the things that are included. And there's still some disagreement on these and
this is something I mentioned in a previous video. Alright, so we have to keep in mind
that even though it's a single term it's actually referring to many things. We should also remember
that there's potential for overlap between scores on these different dimensions. What I mean by that
is your score on one dimension might influence how you express another dimension. So, for instance,
we might think about your openness to experience and maybe that's going to be influenced by your
extraversion or you know your level of openness to social experiences might be different than your
level of openness to ideas. And so we could think about how we could break these down a little bit
further, to get a more detailed view of someone's personality. And lastly that brings us to the idea
that this is a general assessment, right? It's not aimed to tell us everything about a single person,
right? It's a nomothetic approach and that means it's trying to find out about things
that are shared by everyone and so it's going to be more general and that means that your
scores on an assessment like the NEO PI-R aren't going to tell you about your specific behaviors,
right? It's not detailed enough to look at the nuances of a single individual,
and so in the next video we'll take a look at the relationship between scores on trait-based
assessments and people's actual behaviors. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so,
please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!