Question

What are "trait facets" of the Big 5 and how do they contribute to our understanding of behavior?

Answer 1

'NEO PI-R' or 'Big 5' is a 44-item inventory that measures the Big Five Factors (dimensions) of personality of an individual. Each of the big 5 personality traits is then further divided into 6 'trait facets' or 'sub traits' which can be assessed independently of the trait that they belong to. These are:

1. Neuroticism - Anger (hostility), anxiety, depression, immoderation (impulsiveness), self-consciousness and vulnerability.
2. Extraversion - Friendliness (warmth), gregariousness, excitement seeking, activity level, cheerfulness (positivity), and assertiveness.
3. Openness - Intellect (ideas), emotionality (feelings), imagination (fantasy), artistic interests (aesthetics), adventurous (actions), and liberalism (values).
4. Agreeableness - Trust, altruism, modesty, morality (compliance), cooperation (straightforwardness), and sympathy (tender-mindedness).
5. Conscientiousness - Self-efficacy (competence), dutifulness, achievement-striving, orderliness (order), self-discipline, and cautiousness (deliberation).

Big 5 and their trait facets contribute in a major way to our understanding of behavior. Big 5 is widely used and popular due to its consistency across many cultures, its support of theory of personality as well as due to its predictability of behavior. Many researchers hypothesize that these specific trait facets of the "Big 5" factors are better able to predict behavior than the factors themselves. They also suggest that the variance in the traits allows for more specificity in predicting select behavior, while the broad scope of the five factors is too general to accurately predict specific behaviors. Big 5 and its trait facets can help us understand and predict behavior which will have great impact in many fields of work (like business, recruitment, training, development programs, etc.).