WhatIsBeyondthe BigFive? Plenty! - Simine.com

1 What Is Beyond the Big Five? Plenty! Sampo V. PaunonenDouglas N. JacksonUniversity of Western OntarioABSTRACTIn a recent analysis of personality data, Saucier and Goldberg(1998) sought to answer the question, What is beyond the Big Five? Thoseauthors evaluated numerous clusters of English person-descriptive adjectivesthat have been suspected of referring to non Big Five dimensions of results led them to conclude that most, if not all, traits of personality canbe adequately subsumed within the Big Five factor space. In contrast, ourreanalysis of Saucier and Goldberg s own data, using a more realistic criterionfor deciding on whether a variable does or does not fall within a particular factorspace, contradicts their claim.

2 We are led to the conclusion that there are plentyof dimensions of behavior beyond the Big topics in contemporary psychology have generated as much researchand theoretical interest as has the Five-Factor Model of personality. Thatmodel has been embraced not only by a personality psychologist, but byresearchers in clinical, industrial/organizational, and developmental psy-chology as well. The Five-Factor Model, of course, posits that there is astructure to individual differences in human behavior, such that the traitsof personality can be reduced to five orthogonal factors of personal-ity the so-called Big of Personality68:5, October 2000 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councilof Canada Research Grant 410-98-1555 to Sampo V.

3 Paunonen. We thank Michael Ashtonand Kibeom Lee for their comments on this concerning this article should be addressed to Sampo V. Paunonen,Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, noted by Saucier and Goldberg (1998), the Big Five factorsoriginated with studies of the structure underlying personality ratings,ratings made using words taken from the English-language personalitylexicon. When personality adjectives are sampled from the language,either exhaustively or randomly, and used to describe real people, theytend to define five orthogonal clusters. The names applied to thoselexically based clusters, in decreasing order by size, are Extraversion,Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability versus Neuroti-cism, and Intellect or Imagination.

4 Roughly the same five dimensionstend to be found in the same order with impressive consistency acrossdifferent samples of subjects, different selections of personality adjec-tives, and even different cultures and language Big Five factors of personality are thought to be importantprecisely because they are big. According to the Lexical Hypothesis, thewords we have invented to describe individual differences in personalityare reflections of real human behaviors, and the number of words wehave invented is in direct proportion to the importance of the behaviordomain described. As Goldberg (1982) has said, Those individualdifferences that are most significant in the daily transactions of personswith each other become encoded into their language.

5 The more importantsuch a difference is, the more people will notice it and wish to talk of it,with the result that eventually they will invent a word for it (p. 204).The discovery of the Big Five factors of personality in linguistic datahas subsequently led to the structural evaluation of questionnaires andother personality instruments, instruments that may or may not bepurposely designed to measure those factors. Sometimes, however, thelexical and nonlexical ( , questionnaire) factors have differed in mor-phology. For example, whereas the lexical studies typically find a factor(the smallest) called Intellect, questionnaire-based measures have tendedto focus on a dimension (also the smallest) called Openness to Experience( , see Costa & McCrae, 1992).

6 Other differences in Five-FactorModels can also be noted (see reviews by Block, 1995; Digman, 1990;John, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992).The Saucier and Goldberg (1998) AnalysisGoldberg has presented, in some past publications, lists of words that canbe considered characteristic or prototypical of each of the lexical bigfive , based on his extensive analyses of the factor structure underlying822 Paunonen & Jacksonperson descriptors in the English language ( , Goldberg, 1982, 1990,1992). As Saucier and Goldberg (1998) have observed, however, someof the personality adjectives evaluated have not been closely aligned withthe traditional Big Five factors in certain studies.

7 Those authors, in fact,identified 53 such adjective clusters, each relatively homogeneous butsuspected by some as being potentially outside the domain of the tradi-tional lexical Big and Goldberg (1998) modified 21 of their 53 adjective clustersto make them even more homogeneous and included all 74 groups ofwords in their analysis. Their intent was to evaluate the extent to whicheach cluster of words shows statistical allegiance to the lexical Big do this, they administered the personality adjectives along withtraditional Big Five marker adjectives to subjects in a self-report then correlated scores on each of the 74 word clusters with scoreson each of the five factors.

8 Their ultimate test of whether or not aparticular word cluster belonged within the space of the Big Five was tocompute a multiple correlation between that cluster and the five factormeasures. A word cluster that has much variance in common with one ormore of the Big Five would, of course, have a high multiple correlationwith those 74 multiple correlations of Saucier and Goldberg s word clusters withtheir Big Five marker variables ranged from .09 to .67 with a mean of . an arbitrary cutoff score of .30 to decide whether a particular wordcluster was or was not within the five-factor domain, those authors identifiedsome person descriptor clusters, mainly related to physical characteristics,as being beyond the Big Five.

9 Those clusters, each having a multiplecorrelation with the factors of less than .30, included words referring to aperson s height, weight, age, and physical attractiveness. Importantly, onlyone personality-relevant word cluster was likewise judged not to be withinthe bounds of the traditional Big Five, and it was related to religiosity,containing words such as religious, devout, and reverent. With regard toreligiosity, however, Saucier and Goldberg claimed that many might class-ify this cluster as reflecting individual differences in attitudes or ideology,rather than personality (p. 506).Saucier and Goldberg s Data RevisitedSaucier and Goldberg (1998) have done a commendable job of identify-ing clusters of personality adjectives that appear, at least at face value,Beyond the Big Five823not to have a strong relation to any of the Big Five factors.

10 But theiranalysis led them to the conclusion that almost all of those personalityvariables are, in fact, related to the Big Five nontrivially. Upon our initialread of their article, we found this conclusion a curious one, given thenature of some of the person descriptors involved (see Saucier andGoldberg, 1998, Table 1). Consider, for example, the three dimensionsmasculine versus feminine, witty and humorous, cunning and sly. Noneof these seems to belong firmly to any Big Five factor. Saucier andGoldberg, however, concluded that all three dimensions do indeed fit intothe space of the Big Five. But notice that a cluster of person descriptiveadjectives related to one s financial wealth ( , being prosperous, rich,and well-to-do versus being poor), by Saucier and Goldberg s owncriterion, was found to be more a part of the Big Five factors than weredimensions related to being masculine-feminine, or being witty andhumorous, or being cunning and sly (1998, Table 2).