The Big Five personality traits explained in plain words

The Big Five are five broad personality traits that psychologists use to describe how people differ: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, often reversed and called emotional stability. Each one is a scale, not a box, and everyone has some amount of all five. Introvert, extrovert and ambivert aren’t separate types either: they’re simply the low, high and middle parts of the extraversion scale.

Where did the Big Five come from?

It came from a simple idea: if a way people differ really matters, everyday language will have words for it. Starting in the 1930s, researchers gathered thousands of words people use to describe each other, like “talkative”, “careful”, “moody” and “kind”, and asked large numbers of people to rate themselves and others with them. When they looked for patterns in the answers, the words kept clustering into about five groups.

Psychologist Lewis Goldberg did a lot to establish these five groups, and is often credited with the name “Big Five”. Around the same time, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae arrived at a very similar set of five from a different direction and built widely used questionnaires around it. Because so many independent lines of research landed in the same place, the Big Five became the standard way personality is described in psychology research. Some people remember the traits with the acronym OCEAN.

If you’d like to see your own profile as you read, the 50-question Big Five test gives a separate score for each trait and takes about 13 minutes.

What does each of the five traits mean?

Each trait runs from one end to the other, and both ends have something going for them. Here’s what each one describes in everyday terms, using the plainer names the tests on this site give them.

Openness: how much you enjoy ideas and imagination

Openness, sometimes called intellect or imagination, is about curiosity, creativity and appetite for new experiences. People higher in openness tend to enjoy art, abstract ideas, unusual people and questions without simple answers, and routine can feel dull to them. People lower in openness tend to be practical and down to earth: they prefer ideas they can use, value what’s proven, and are often grounded and realistic. In the results, the two ends are called “Practical” and “Curious”.

Conscientiousness: organisation and follow-through

Conscientiousness is about order, planning, reliability and getting things done. Higher scorers like structure, pay attention to details and finish what they start, and others count on them. On busy days the same drive can tip into being hard on themselves. Lower scorers tend to be flexible and spontaneous, relaxed about change and happy to go with the flow, while routines, tidiness and deadlines take more effort. The two ends are “Flexible” and “Organised”.

Extraversion: how outgoing you are

Extraversion is about how much you draw energy from people, conversation and activity. Higher scorers feel at ease around people, enjoy starting conversations and may get restless when alone for long. Lower scorers recharge best alone or with a few close people, and busy social settings tend to use up their energy. The two ends are “Quieter” and “Outgoing”, and this is the trait where introvert and extrovert live, more on that below.

Agreeableness: how you relate to others

Agreeableness is about warmth, cooperation and how much you tune in to other people’s feelings. Higher scorers tend to be kind, patient and easy to talk to, though that care can make it harder to say no or put their own needs first. Lower scorers tend to be direct and independent: they say what they think, focus on facts and goals, and are hard to push around, though others may sometimes see them as less warm than they are. The two ends are “Direct” and “Warm”.

Neuroticism, or emotional stability: how steady your emotions feel

This trait is about how strongly stress, worry and changes in mood reach you. Psychologists often call the high end neuroticism, which is a heavy word for something very ordinary, so many questionnaires flip it round and score emotional stability instead. People who feel things strongly tend to notice a lot, and hard days can feel heavier for them. People at the steady end don’t get upset easily and their mood tends to stay even, though that doesn’t mean they never struggle. The tests here call the two ends “Sensitive” and “Steady”.

This trait is the one most closely linked with wellbeing. People who score high on neuroticism are more likely to struggle with anxiety and low mood at some point. That doesn’t make it a diagnosis, and it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you. It can be a useful nudge to build good ways of calming down and looking after yourself. If your mind tends to replay worries, the post on breaking the overthinking loop may help.

What do your Big Five scores mean?

They show where you sit on each trait, from one end to the other. They don’t compare you with a particular group, and there’s no overall score, because adding the traits together wouldn’t mean anything.

In the Big Five personality test, built from the International Personality Item Pool, each trait gets ten statements and a score from 10 to 50. Scores are described in three bands:

The quick personality test, the Ten-Item Personality Inventory, uses the same five traits with two statements each, scored as an average from 1 to 7. There, 1 to 3.4 is the lower end, 3.5 to 4.5 is “In between”, and 4.6 to 7 is the higher end. With only two questions per trait it’s a rough first sketch, and one answer can move a score quite a lot.

Whichever you take, “In between” is a common and perfectly good result. Personality traits are spread out like height: lots of people near the middle, fewer at the extremes.

What’s the difference between an introvert, an extrovert and an ambivert?

They’re three areas on the same scale. An introvert sits towards the quieter end of extraversion, an extrovert towards the outgoing end, and an ambivert somewhere in the middle. The words introversion and extraversion were made popular by psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1920s, and they’ve been part of how psychologists describe personality ever since.

The key idea is energy. Introverts tend to find that busy social settings use up their energy and time alone gives it back. Extroverts tend to find the opposite: company and activity lift them, and long stretches alone leave them restless rather than rested. Ambiverts can enjoy both, and which side shows depends on the day, their mood and who they’re with.

Because the trait is a scale, ambiverts aren’t a rare third type. Most people sit closer to the middle than to either end, so if you’ve never felt like a clear introvert or extrovert, that’s probably why. In the Big Five test, “Quieter”, “In between” and “Outgoing” roughly line up with introvert, ambivert and extrovert, though the test itself doesn’t use those labels.

Is introversion the same as shyness?

No. Shyness is about worry: fear of being judged, embarrassed or rejected by others. Introversion is about preference: liking quieter settings and smaller doses of company. You can be an introvert who isn’t shy at all, happy to give a talk and then go home for a quiet evening, or an extrovert who longs for company but feels anxious in it. If fear of judgement is what holds you back socially, that’s closer to social anxiety than to introversion, and the social anxiety test asks about that directly. Some people who look calm and capable carry a lot of hidden worry, which the post on high-functioning anxiety describes.

Introversion also isn’t the same as keeping people at a distance emotionally. A quiet introvert can be very comfortable with closeness. Discomfort with intimacy in relationships is a separate thing, covered in the post on avoidant attachment.

How is the Big Five different from Myers-Briggs?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people into one of 16 types, while the Big Five gives you a score on each of five continuous traits. Myers-Briggs is much better known and widely used in workplaces and team-building. The Big Five has far more research behind it and is what most personality psychologists use.

Myers-Briggs was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, building on Carl Jung’s ideas about psychological types. Its popularity is easy to understand. A four-letter type is memorable, the descriptions are written in a warm, recognisable way, and it gives people a shared language for talking about differences without anyone being wrong. Many people find that genuinely useful.

The main criticisms from researchers are about its structure rather than its spirit:

• It splits scales into either-or. Most people are near the middle on traits like extraversion, so a small change in answers can flip a letter. That’s one reason many people get a different type when they take it again.
• It leaves out emotional ups and downs. Myers-Briggs has nothing that matches neuroticism, the trait most closely linked with wellbeing.
• Its types don’t carry as much information as the scores underneath. Two people with the same type can be very different, and two with different types can be almost the same.

The two aren’t worlds apart. When Robert McCrae and Paul Costa compared them in 1989, they found that four of the Myers-Briggs scales line up with four of the Big Five traits: introversion and extraversion with extraversion, sensing and intuition with openness, thinking and feeling with agreeableness, and judging and perceiving with conscientiousness.

If you already know your Myers-Briggs type and it feels right, the Big Five isn’t a contradiction. It’s a more detailed and better-tested way of describing much the same differences, plus one important trait Myers-Briggs leaves out.

Can your personality change over time?

Yes, slowly. The Big Five traits are fairly stable in adulthood, which is why a test result from last year will usually still look familiar. But they do shift. In a large 2006 review of long-term studies, Brent Roberts and colleagues found that on average, people tend to become more conscientious, more agreeable and more emotionally stable as they move through adulthood, with a lot of that change happening in young adulthood.

Life events, relationships, work and deliberate effort can all nudge traits too. And your answers on any given day are coloured by your mood: a stressful month can make you rate yourself as more anxious and less outgoing than usual. That’s why it’s worth answering as you usually are, not as you feel this week, and why there’s no need to retake a personality test often.

What can a personality test tell you, and what can’t it?

It can tell you a lot about your natural tendencies: where your energy comes from, which situations come easily and which take effort, and why you and someone close to you might see the same situation differently. That’s useful for choosing how to work, how to rest and how to talk about differences without blame.

It can’t tell you what you’re capable of, how good a person you are, or whether you have a mental health condition. Each of the traits has a healthy range at both ends. A few common mix-ups are worth naming:

• Low conscientiousness isn’t ADHD. Being relaxed about plans and tidiness is a personality trait. Lifelong difficulty steering attention, starting in childhood and causing real problems, is something else, and the post on how ADHD is missed in women explains how it can hide.
• Introversion isn’t autism. Preferring quiet evenings and small groups is where you sit on the extraversion scale. Autism is a lifelong difference in how a person communicates, socialises and takes in the world through their senses, and the guide to telling ADHD and autism apart covers what it looks like.
• High neuroticism isn’t an anxiety disorder. It means stress and worry reach you more easily, which can raise the risk, but it isn’t a diagnosis.
• Low agreeableness isn’t unkindness. Direct people can be deeply caring. They just lead with honesty rather than harmony.

If a result stings, for example a high score on the sensitive end, it’s worth being gentle with yourself about it. Every trait comes with costs and strengths, and the post on being kinder to yourself has ideas for when self-criticism kicks in.

Which personality test should you take?

It depends on how much time you have and how much detail you want. Sprout has four, all built on published questionnaires:

• For a quick sketch: the ten-question personality test takes about two minutes and gives a rough score for each of the five traits.
• For a fuller picture: the 50-question Big Five test gives each trait ten statements and takes about 13 minutes.
• For the finer detail: the detailed Big Five profile uses the Big Five Inventory (BFI-2), developed by Christopher Soto and Oliver John in 2017, and splits each trait into three narrower sides, such as sociability, assertiveness and energy within extraversion.
• For a sixth trait: the six-trait HEXACO test, from Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, adds honesty and humility: how sincere, fair and modest you tend to be.

Whichever you choose, answer as you honestly are rather than as you’d like to be, and treat the result as a description, not a verdict.

Getting to know your own five

The Big Five won’t put you in a box, and that’s its strength. It shows you where you sit on five dimensions that people everywhere use to describe each other, with room for all the in-between that real people are made of. If you’re curious about yours, start with the full Big Five test, or the quick version if you only have a couple of minutes, and see which parts ring true.