(I can’t say I’m really a fan of the big 5 questionnaire in general, though. Agreeableness mixes together kindness and conformity. Conscientiousness mixes together industriousness, dependability and extrinsic motivatability. Openness confounds sensation seeking and open-mindedness. I know it’s the most respected assessment, but I think it’s really messy.)
Agreeableness mixes together kindness and conformity. Conscientiousness mixes together industriousness, dependability and extrinsic motivatability. Openness confounds sensation seeking and open-mindedness.
Don’t those map onto facets, though? You can hardly blame the Big 5 there when you’ve named no less than 7 possible factors.
I suppose I’d be willing to say that those are “facets” of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn’t a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.
They might have superficial behavioral similarities. To use Openness as the example, both sensation seekers and the intellectually open minded might go on a roller coaster—one for the sheer thrill and the other out of curiosity as to how it feels- but I wouldn’t predict those two qualities to be particularly more correlated than say, Extroversion and Openness.
Or, to use Agreeableness as the example, I wouldn’t expect conformists to be kinder -, even if the two are superficially similar in that they are less likely to get into fights. Conformity and kindness aren’t two facets of the same diamond, they’re just two mostly separate variables which influence how likely you are to object to things.
My criticism is that the Big Five lumps together qualities that aren’t even particularly similar into one variable.
(Although, I suppose it is fair to say I’d expect high inter-correlation between industriousness, dependability, and extrinsic motivatability, so I guess you can chalk those up as facets of a single thing)
I suppose I’d be willing to say that those are “facets” of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn’t a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.
I think we may have a confusion of terminology here. The Big Five is the result of a statistical procedure which boils down thousands of peoples’ responses to thousands of questions (based on personality words) into a set of 5 statistical abstractions which are as non-redundant and predict as many responses on average as possible; why 5? Well, 5 abstractions were chosen because if you boil it down further to 4/3/2/1, what’s left doesn’t seem particularly meaningful (there may be a 1 ‘J’ healthy-personality factor akin to intelligence’s G factor, but last I saw it mentioned it was still highly doubtful), and more than 5 would be harder to use since 5 is a nice easily-handled number which seems to map pretty well onto gross aspects of personalities & can be easily measured in a short questionnaire.
However, there is no reason you could not have a factorization instead as a Less-Big 6 (something like HEXACO) or a Even-Less-Big 7 or some larger number. And specifically, each of the Big 5 are themselves the correlation of 6 more specific factors or ‘facets’ for a total of 30 factors available (assuming you used the longer Big 5 tests which allow reasonably accurate per-facet measurements instead of lumping them together and only giving you say Openness); for example, Openness is extracted from the facets/factors dubbed “Fantasy”, “Aesthetics”, “Feelings”, “Actions”, “Ideas”, & “Values”. You might not consider the “Ideas” facet (whatever that is) to have anything to do with the “Fantasy” facet, but apparently they do correlate in the real-world samples of people taking the long more in-depth
personality surveys which were used to construct the Big 5.
Often all you need are the top-level factors and so the details of how many factors doesn’t matter, but sometimes it is important to go down to the more fine-grained factors and make use of the 30 facets. For example, males/females do not show up as very different on Big 5 inventories, despite the universal belief that men & women have very different personalities; but this is because the male/female difference is on the facets and that gets hidden when it’s boiled down to the 5: “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality”.
And the facets themselves can be factorized even more narrowly if one wants. (The most extreme example I’ve seen was a paper I can’t seem to refind at the moment, but where they had hundreds of people fill out thousands of test items online and with this huge bulk of data, they extracted what they called the Tiny 100 or the Little 100 or something like that.)
but I wouldn’t predict those two qualities to be particularly more correlated than say, Extroversion and Openness.
I think your prediction would just be wrong. Interest in new ideas does seem to correlate with sensation-seeking (I’d guess those are the Openness facets “Ideas” and “Action”, respectively) and that’s why they help give rise to the Openness factor.
Conformity and kindness aren’t two facets of the same diamond
I’d agree on that one. Conformity I would expect to fall under Conscientiousness (“Order”?) and kindness is definitely under Agreeableness (“Altruism”). Hence conformism and kindness are going to be mostly independent traits.
So as I said before, you changed my mind but—now that I’ve had some time to mull it over, I’ll articulate why instinctively I felt something wrong about the big-five...because everything you say is true, but I still have a nagging feeling of wrongness. I’ve put the more important parts in >quotation format, since these are unverbalized thoughts still in formation and tend to over-ramble and I don’t have time to properly pare it down at the moment.
Back when I first looked at the questions to formulate the Big 5 (my memory indicates a much longer questionnaire than what see when I google it now) I was bothered by questions such as “I tend to tell people when I disagree with them” and “I like to make people comfortable” both being held under the same variable (agreeableness).
It seemed to me like there were many underlying factors at play in how someone might answer such a question: “aversion to causing negative emotions in others” (niceness) and “aversion to drawing anger towards oneself” (conformity) competing with “aversion to white lies”, such that an honest-to-a-fault person would be behaviorally similar to a jerk, such that kindness is behaviorally similar to weakness. I had a similar pattern of objection for conscientiousness (sense of responsibility, preference for order, attention to detail, willpower), extroversion (Preference for companionship, social skills, lack of social anxiety, general energy level).
So then, I think the “general form” of my objection is:
“Factors X and Y are unrelated, but X and Y both contribute to factor P. You’re creating a Construct C, measuring X, Y, and P separately, and tossing them all in the C bucket, and that annoys me.”
Why did it annoy me? Well, it’s mostly because in some cases, we called Construct C by a name that I felt aught to be reserved for Factor X. For example, I intuitively feel “Extrovert” aught to be reserved for “the degree to which one prefers comfortable social situations to comfortable solo situations” and should not be entangled with social skills.
I think this “tangling” of variables which intuitively bugs me is why all the factors correlate (except for neuroticism, which inversely correlates). To give one example, someone who is simultaneously extroverted (as defined by me, above) and neurotic will have depressed extroversion scores because they’re nervous and unskilled in social situations. They’re not introverted, they’re just isolated, and the Big 5 can’t tell the difference. The human reader will go on to conclude that introverts are inherently more neurotic. (I can give several other examples in this format for the other constructs, if you don’t agree with this particular one).
Here’s an example of this happening “in the wild”: Here’s someone talking about the dark side of creativity, and they reference this study showing that creatives are lower on the honest-humility factor on the HEXACO.
Now, what do you think a highly creative, original thinker would answer on a HEXACO question like “People sometimes tell me that I am too critical of others”? Do they voice criticism because they are arrogant meanies who don’t care about hurting others, or is it because they’re nonconformists who value honesty over the warmth of mutual agreement and are simply treating others as they want to be treated themselves? Obviously the latter, right? But in the data, that’s going to come out as “Scoring low on Honesty-Humility”. (This sort of thing is why I suggested that Agreeableness ends up collapsing both kindness and conformity).
Anyway, my previous dismissal of the Big 5 was wrong. It’s very good at what it claims to do, which is separate out factors which lead to certain patterns of responses. From the algorithms point of view, it doesn’t matter if X and Y are uncorrelated, they still cluster together because of the relationship to P and fold into Construct C. And it is useful to separate out broad patterns of responses into broad constructs even if those constructs contain totally uncorrelated factors, because there is no way you could separate out all the uncorrelated factors anyhow.
Still, that’s why it bugs me. I feel intuitively more satisfied when I look at tests which attempt to myopically measure uncorrelated factors individually and totally ignore the other factors, even though those tests probably won’t be as good at catching broad swathes of behavior like the Big 5 can. People do actually feel like creative smart folks are arrogant and narcissistic meanies because of the behavioral overlap (which is why Lesswrong-ish types are often accused of arrogance and write posts delineating proper humility from “false humility”), and the Big 5 does capture things like that. That instinctively bugs me because it’s conflating things in the same way human beings do, but on the other hand it’s conflating things in the same pattern that humans conflate things, which is actually a pretty big achievement for an algorithm now that I’ve spent more time thinking about it.
Considering all of the above, I think it would stop bugging me if we had more precise labeling for the names of the five factors. The trouble I have is that it’s just too easy to conflate here, the researchers are human to begin with and already prone to conflation, and then when we imprecisely label the Big 5 factors we only facilitate that conflation. (And maybe the original researchers had this danger in mind, when they labeled it Agreeableness instead of “Niceness”, hoping that people would realize that compliance is a factor as much as altruism, but...)
Does that make sense / still sound wrong to you? (If you get to it, sorry it’s not more concise.)
I suppose I’d be willing to say that those are “facets” of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn’t a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.
The big five aren’t a-priori categories. They are supposed to be factors that come out of principle component analysis.
Of interest: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201108/is-conscientiousness-compatible-creativity
(I can’t say I’m really a fan of the big 5 questionnaire in general, though. Agreeableness mixes together kindness and conformity. Conscientiousness mixes together industriousness, dependability and extrinsic motivatability. Openness confounds sensation seeking and open-mindedness. I know it’s the most respected assessment, but I think it’s really messy.)
Don’t those map onto facets, though? You can hardly blame the Big 5 there when you’ve named no less than 7 possible factors.
I suppose I’d be willing to say that those are “facets” of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn’t a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.
They might have superficial behavioral similarities. To use Openness as the example, both sensation seekers and the intellectually open minded might go on a roller coaster—one for the sheer thrill and the other out of curiosity as to how it feels- but I wouldn’t predict those two qualities to be particularly more correlated than say, Extroversion and Openness.
Or, to use Agreeableness as the example, I wouldn’t expect conformists to be kinder -, even if the two are superficially similar in that they are less likely to get into fights. Conformity and kindness aren’t two facets of the same diamond, they’re just two mostly separate variables which influence how likely you are to object to things.
My criticism is that the Big Five lumps together qualities that aren’t even particularly similar into one variable.
(Although, I suppose it is fair to say I’d expect high inter-correlation between industriousness, dependability, and extrinsic motivatability, so I guess you can chalk those up as facets of a single thing)
I think we may have a confusion of terminology here. The Big Five is the result of a statistical procedure which boils down thousands of peoples’ responses to thousands of questions (based on personality words) into a set of 5 statistical abstractions which are as non-redundant and predict as many responses on average as possible; why 5? Well, 5 abstractions were chosen because if you boil it down further to 4/3/2/1, what’s left doesn’t seem particularly meaningful (there may be a 1 ‘J’ healthy-personality factor akin to intelligence’s G factor, but last I saw it mentioned it was still highly doubtful), and more than 5 would be harder to use since 5 is a nice easily-handled number which seems to map pretty well onto gross aspects of personalities & can be easily measured in a short questionnaire.
However, there is no reason you could not have a factorization instead as a Less-Big 6 (something like HEXACO) or a Even-Less-Big 7 or some larger number. And specifically, each of the Big 5 are themselves the correlation of 6 more specific factors or ‘facets’ for a total of 30 factors available (assuming you used the longer Big 5 tests which allow reasonably accurate per-facet measurements instead of lumping them together and only giving you say Openness); for example, Openness is extracted from the facets/factors dubbed “Fantasy”, “Aesthetics”, “Feelings”, “Actions”, “Ideas”, & “Values”. You might not consider the “Ideas” facet (whatever that is) to have anything to do with the “Fantasy” facet, but apparently they do correlate in the real-world samples of people taking the long more in-depth personality surveys which were used to construct the Big 5.
Often all you need are the top-level factors and so the details of how many factors doesn’t matter, but sometimes it is important to go down to the more fine-grained factors and make use of the 30 facets. For example, males/females do not show up as very different on Big 5 inventories, despite the universal belief that men & women have very different personalities; but this is because the male/female difference is on the facets and that gets hidden when it’s boiled down to the 5: “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality”.
And the facets themselves can be factorized even more narrowly if one wants. (The most extreme example I’ve seen was a paper I can’t seem to refind at the moment, but where they had hundreds of people fill out thousands of test items online and with this huge bulk of data, they extracted what they called the Tiny 100 or the Little 100 or something like that.)
I think your prediction would just be wrong. Interest in new ideas does seem to correlate with sensation-seeking (I’d guess those are the Openness facets “Ideas” and “Action”, respectively) and that’s why they help give rise to the Openness factor.
I’d agree on that one. Conformity I would expect to fall under Conscientiousness (“Order”?) and kindness is definitely under Agreeableness (“Altruism”). Hence conformism and kindness are going to be mostly independent traits.
So as I said before, you changed my mind but—now that I’ve had some time to mull it over, I’ll articulate why instinctively I felt something wrong about the big-five...because everything you say is true, but I still have a nagging feeling of wrongness. I’ve put the more important parts in >quotation format, since these are unverbalized thoughts still in formation and tend to over-ramble and I don’t have time to properly pare it down at the moment.
It seemed to me like there were many underlying factors at play in how someone might answer such a question: “aversion to causing negative emotions in others” (niceness) and “aversion to drawing anger towards oneself” (conformity) competing with “aversion to white lies”, such that an honest-to-a-fault person would be behaviorally similar to a jerk, such that kindness is behaviorally similar to weakness. I had a similar pattern of objection for conscientiousness (sense of responsibility, preference for order, attention to detail, willpower), extroversion (Preference for companionship, social skills, lack of social anxiety, general energy level).
I think this “tangling” of variables which intuitively bugs me is why all the factors correlate (except for neuroticism, which inversely correlates). To give one example, someone who is simultaneously extroverted (as defined by me, above) and neurotic will have depressed extroversion scores because they’re nervous and unskilled in social situations. They’re not introverted, they’re just isolated, and the Big 5 can’t tell the difference. The human reader will go on to conclude that introverts are inherently more neurotic. (I can give several other examples in this format for the other constructs, if you don’t agree with this particular one).
Anyway, my previous dismissal of the Big 5 was wrong. It’s very good at what it claims to do, which is separate out factors which lead to certain patterns of responses. From the algorithms point of view, it doesn’t matter if X and Y are uncorrelated, they still cluster together because of the relationship to P and fold into Construct C. And it is useful to separate out broad patterns of responses into broad constructs even if those constructs contain totally uncorrelated factors, because there is no way you could separate out all the uncorrelated factors anyhow.
Still, that’s why it bugs me. I feel intuitively more satisfied when I look at tests which attempt to myopically measure uncorrelated factors individually and totally ignore the other factors, even though those tests probably won’t be as good at catching broad swathes of behavior like the Big 5 can. People do actually feel like creative smart folks are arrogant and narcissistic meanies because of the behavioral overlap (which is why Lesswrong-ish types are often accused of arrogance and write posts delineating proper humility from “false humility”), and the Big 5 does capture things like that. That instinctively bugs me because it’s conflating things in the same way human beings do, but on the other hand it’s conflating things in the same pattern that humans conflate things, which is actually a pretty big achievement for an algorithm now that I’ve spent more time thinking about it.
Does that make sense / still sound wrong to you? (If you get to it, sorry it’s not more concise.)
I have now changed my mind about the Big Five. Thanks!
The big five aren’t a-priori categories. They are supposed to be factors that come out of principle component analysis.