RESEARCH

Allport and Odbert (1936) were the first researchers to identify the trait-descriptive words in the English language.  Their compendium of 4,500 words has been the primary starting point of language-based personality trait research for the last sixty years.

From 1954-1961, two Air Force personnel researchers, Tupes and Christal (1961), became the first researchers to make use of Allport and Odbert's work. Tupes and Christal thoroughly established the five factors we know today.  Sadly, they published their results in an obscure Air Force publication that was not read either by the psychology or academic communities.

In the late 1950s, Warren Norman at the University of Michigan learned of Tupes and Christal’s work.  Norman (1963) replicated the Tupes and Christal study and confirmed the five-factor structure for trait taxonomy.  For bringing this discovery into the mainstream academic psychology community, it became known, understandably but inappropriately, as “Norman's Big Five.”  Rightly, it should be Tupes and Christal's Big Five, which we now refer to as the Five-Factor Model. 

During the 1960s and 1970s traits were out of favor-- only behaviors and situational responses were allowed.  However, radical behaviorism began to fall from its pedestal in the early 1980s with the rise of cognitive science.  Cognitive scientists proclaimed that there was more to the human mind than stimulus and response (Howard, 1994).  Throughout the 1980s and continuing through the present, personality researchers have established the Five-Factor Model as the basic paradigm for personality research.

Consensus in the Psychological Community

Up until twenty years ago, the personality research community was fragmented, with Freud, Erikson, Horney, Jung, Murray, Eysenck, and others all claiming the best model.  All were partially right, but only the Five-Factor Model has arms big enough to include them all.

What is different today versus twenty years ago is that there has been a clear trend towards embracing a single model-- the Five-Factor Model-- as the research paradigm to follow. But while unanimity among personality researchers is still beyond our grasp, one can sense the excitement among researchers in the recent literature:

• The comprehensive analyses in Dutch have provided so far the strongest cross-language evidence for the Five-Factor Model. John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf (1988)
• The past decade has witnessed a rapid convergence of views regarding the structure of the concepts of personality.  Digman (1990)
• The major aim of this article has been to provide sufficient evidence to alleviate any qualms about the generality of the Five-Factor Model structure. Goldberg (1990)
• We believe that the robustness of the Five-Factor Model provides a meaningful framework for formulating and testing hypotheses relating individual differences in personality to a wide range of criteria in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, performance appraisal, and training and development.  Barrick & Mount (1991)
• I again, anticipate more extensive use by tomorrow's practitioners of new generations of inventories, for example, the NEO Personality Inventory developed by Costa and McCrae (1988) for the assessment in healthy individuals of something akin to today's five basic dimensions of character and personality that have evolved empirically from a line of inquiry first suggested by Galton a century ago.  Matarazzo (1992)
• The past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst of interest in the most fundamental problem of the field-- the search for a scientifically compelling taxonomy of personality traits. More importantly, the beginning of a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic representation.  Goldberg (1993)
• Currently the most popular approach among psychologists for studying personality traits is the Five-Factor Model or Big Five dimensions of personality.    Scott Acton (2001)
• There are a variety of different perspectives in the field of personality, including psychoanalytic and cognitive interpretations. However, the most commonly used and accepted is the Five-Factor descriptive model.    Piers Steel, Joseph Schmidt, and Jonas Shultz (2008)
• The [Five-Factor] model is considered to be the most comprehensive empirical or data-driven enquiry into personality.    Wikipedia (2009)