Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five Trait taxonomy

Abstract

The first version of this chapter (John, 1990) offered a comprehensive and detailed review of most of the available research. This is no longer possible as we are writing this chapter in 2007. What has happened? Figure 4.1 uses publication trends over the past 25 years to illustrate how fundamentally the field has changed. Specifically, we show the number of publications related to the Big Five personality traits for each 5-year interval, beginning in the early 1980s, obtained from keyword searches of the PsycINFO database. To provide a comparison, we also show the publication trend for the influential models developed earlier by Cattell and by Eysenck. Although both were then close to retirement age, their influence had continued during the 1980s. In fact, both Cattell (1990) and Eysenck (1990) had written chapters on personality traits for the first edition of this handbook. What did we expect to find? Our intuitions suggested that publications on the Big Five had increased substantially since the mid-1980s, with Cattell's and Eysenck's influence decreasing. But we were surprised by the data. First, the ascent of the Big Five happened much more gradually than we had expected, and Cattell's and Eysenck's influence held steady much longer. As Figure 4.1 shows, it took until the late 1990s for the number of Big Five publications to finally overtake the two older models. Second, whereas references to Cattell and Eysenck models have finally begun to decline in absolute numbers, their decline has been small compared to the amazing increase in research publications on the Big Five. By 2006, the last year for which we had figures available, the number of Big Five publications exceeded 300 per year, compared with less than 50 for the two older models. In the 9 years since the previous version of this chapter (John & Srivastava, 1999) was completed, almost 2,000 new publications on the Big Five have appeared. As a result, we can now cover only a small fraction of all the relevant work in this chapter. Our main goal remains to provide a general overview and introduction to the field that focuses on the main issues and can serve as a useful reference resource. We therefore refer the reader to more specialized sources or reviews as needed. We begin our chapter with the history of the Big Five, including the discovery of the five dimensions, research replicating and extending the model, its convergence with research in the questionnaire tradition, and the development of several instruments to measure the Big Five. Then we compare three of the most frequently used instruments and discuss some new data regarding their reliability and validity. Finally, we address a number of conceptual issues, including how the Big Five taxonomy is structured hierarchically, how the five dimensions develop, whether they predict important life outcomes, and whether they are descriptive or explanatory concepts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)