Following up on yesterday's post about facets of personhood, I thought I'd write briefly about the more scientific topic of facets in personality psychology. Although I am far from an expert in this field, longtime readers know that I'm skeptical about the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and prefer the five-factor "OCEAN" model of personality theory (although the six-factor "HEXACO" model seems quite good, too). The five factors are: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (HEXACO adds a factor for Honesty and Humility).
Boiling down all of human personality to five or six factors is conceptually convenient because we humans can't handle too many mental units at once, but in fact the original theorists of the five-factor model identified six specific facets under each factor, which results a larger list of thirty facets, as follows:
Because research shows that the specific facets are more directly correlated with certain life outcomes, in practice they might be more useful than the broad factors. Consider, for instance, a person who reliably shows up for work on time but isn't especially thorough in completing tasks; or a person who is curious about a wide range of topics but doesn't make original contributions in any of them.
Yet of course we have many more than thirty personality-related adjectives in English; lexical research has generated lists as large as ~18,000 (Allport and Odbert 1936), reduced to ~2,800 (Norman 1967) or ~1,710 (Goldberg 1982) and so on. Studies in languages as diverse as Dutch, French, Czech, Hungarian, and Korean have resulted in five-factor or six-factor models similar to OCEAN and HEXACO, with some interesting nuances (e.g., a greater weighting on the Honesty and Humility factor). These larger lists do greater justice to the complexity of human personality, albeit at the cost of being rather overwhelming (is that extraverted person best described as outgoing, jolly, bubbly, talkative, conversational, peppy, merry, effervescent, vocal, frisky, sparkling, lively, frolicsome, vibrant, or perky?). In pursuit of self-knowledge, the thirty facets seem like a good place to start, since they're detailed enough to be descriptive without being so detailed as to be unusable.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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