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What Is Beyond the Big Five? Plenty!

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What Is Beyond the Big Five? Plenty! What Is Beyond the Big Five? Plenty! Sampo V. Paunonen Douglas N. Jackson University of Western Ontario ABSTRACT In a recent analysis of personality data, Saucier and Goldberg (1998) sought to answer the question, What is beyond the Big Five? Those authors evaluated numerous clusters of English person-descriptive adjectives that have been suspected of referring to non–Big Five dimensions of personality. Their results led them to conclude that most, if not all, traits of personality can be adequately subsumed within the Big Five factor space. In contrast, our reanalysis of Saucier and Goldberg’s own data, using a more realistic criterion for deciding on whether a variable does or does not fall within a particular factor space, contradicts their claim. We are led to the conclusion that there are plenty of dimensions of behavior beyond the Big Five. Few topics in contemporary psychology have generated as much research and theoretical interest as has the Five-Factor Model of personality. That model has been embraced not only by a personality psychologist, but by researchers in clinical, industrial/organizational, and developmental psy- chology as well. The Five-Factor Model, of course, posits that there is a structure to individual differences in human behavior, such that the traits of personality can be reduced to five orthogonal factors of personal- ity—the so-called Big Five. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Grant 410-98-1555 to Sampo V.Paunonen. WethankMichael Ashton and Kibeom Lee for their comments on this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sampo V. Paunonen, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada. Journal of Personality 68:5, October 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. 822 Paunonen & Jackson As noted by Saucier and Goldberg (1998), the Big Five factors originated with studies of the structure underlying personality ratings, ratings made using words taken from the English-language personality lexicon. When personality adjectives are sampled from the language, either exhaustively or randomly, and used to describe real people, they tend to define five orthogonal clusters. The names applied to those lexically based clusters, in decreasing order by size, are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability versus Neuroti- cism, and Intellect or Imagination. Roughly the same five dimensions tend to be found in the same order with impressive consistency across different samples of subjects, different selections of personality adjec- tives, and even different cultures and language groups. The Big Five factors of personality are thought to be important precisely because they are big. According to the Lexical Hypothesis, the words we have invented to describe individual differences in personality are reflections of real human behaviors, and the number of words we have invented is in direct proportion to the importance of the behavior domain described. As Goldberg (1982) has said, “Those individual differences that are most significant in the daily transactions of persons with each other become encoded into their language. The more important such a difference is, the more people will notice it and wish to talk of it, with the result that eventually they will invent a word for it” (p. 204). The discovery of the Big Five factors of personality in linguistic data has subsequently led to the structural evaluation of questionnaires and other personality instruments, instruments that may or may not be purposely designed to measure those factors. Sometimes, however, the lexical and nonlexical (i.e., questionnaire) factors have differed in mor- phology. For example, whereas the lexical studies typically find a factor (the smallest) called Intellect, questionnaire-based measures have tended to focus on a dimension (also the smallest) called Openness to Experience (e.g., see Costa & McCrae, 1992). Other differences in Five-Factor Models can also be noted (see reviews by Block, 1995; Digman, 1990; John, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992). The Saucier and Goldberg (1998) Analysis Goldberg has presented, in some past publications, lists of words that can be considered characteristic or prototypical of each of the lexical Big Five, based on his extensive analyses of the factor structure underlying Beyond the Big Five 823 person descriptors in the English language (e.g., Goldberg, 1982, 1990, 1992). As Saucier and Goldberg (1998) have observed, however, some of the personality adjectives evaluated have not been closely aligned with the traditional Big Five factors in certain studies. Those authors, in fact, identified 53 such adjective clusters, each relatively homogeneous but suspected by some as being potentially outside the domain of the tradi- tional lexical Big Five. Saucier and Goldberg (1998) modified 21 of their 53 adjective clusters to make them even more homogeneous and included all 74 groups of words in their analysis. Their intent was to evaluate the extent to which each cluster of words shows statistical allegiance to the lexical Big Five. To do this, they administered the personality adjectives along with traditional Big Five marker adjectives to subjects in a self-report format. They then correlated scores on each of the 74 word clusters with scores on each of the five factors. Their ultimate test of whether or not a particular word cluster belonged within the space of the Big Five was to compute a multiple correlation between that cluster and the five factor measures. A word cluster that has much variance in common with one or more of the Big Five would, of course, have a high multiple correlation with those factors. The 74 multiple correlations of Saucier and Goldberg’s word clusters with their Big Five marker variables ranged from .09 to .67 with a mean of .38. Using an arbitrary cutoff score of .30 to decide whether a particular word cluster was or was not within the five-factor domain, those authors identified some person descriptor clusters, mainly related to physical characteristics, as being beyond the Big Five. Those clusters, each having a multiple correlation with the factors of less than .30, included words referring to a person’s height, weight, age, and physical attractiveness. Importantly, only one personality-relevant word cluster was likewise judged not to be within the bounds of the traditional Big Five, and it was related to religiosity, containing words such as religious, devout, and reverent. With regard to religiosity, however, Saucier and Goldberg claimed that “many might class- ify this cluster as reflecting individual differences in attitudes or ideology, rather than personality” (p. 506). Saucier and Goldberg’s Data Revisited Saucier and Goldberg (1998) have done a commendable job of identify- ing clusters of personality adjectives that appear, at least at face value, 824 Paunonen & Jackson not to have a strong relation to any of the Big Five factors. But their analysis led them to the conclusion that almost all of those personality variables are, in fact, related to the Big Five nontrivially. Upon our initial read of their article, we found this conclusion a curious one, given the nature of some of the person descriptors involved (see Saucier and Goldberg, 1998, Table 1). Consider, for example, the three dimensions masculine versus feminine, witty and humorous, cunning and sly. None of these seems to belong firmly to any Big Five factor. Saucier and Goldberg, however, concluded that all three dimensions do indeed fit into the space of the Big Five. But notice that a cluster of person descriptive adjectives related to one’s financial wealth (i.e., being prosperous, rich, and well-to-do versus being poor), by Saucier and Goldberg’s own criterion, was found to be more a part of the Big Five factors than were dimensions related to being masculine-feminine, or being witty and humorous, or being cunning and sly (1998, Table 2). Curious indeed. As we are about to describe, our consideration of Saucier and Gold- berg’s (1998) results has led us to the conclusion that many of the variables assessed in that study do not have a lot in common with the traditional lexical Big Five. But this conclusion stands in direct contrast to that of Saucier and Goldberg. The primary reason for this discrepancy is to be found in the choice of the statistical criterion for what constitutes a Big Five indicator. As we explain below, we take issue with Saucier and Goldberg’s criterion as being much too liberal. Table 2 in Saucier and Goldberg’s (1998) article shows the correlations between each of their 74 adjective clusters and each of their Big Five factor measures. Now note how those correlations are similar to factor loadings, being the correlations between variables and factors as found in a normal factor structure matrix. In fact, those correlations are properly interpreted as factor loadings in an extension analysis (see Dwyer, 1937; Gorsuch, 1983; Mosier, 1938). An extension analysis refers to the tech- nique of correlating variables with factors when the variables themselves were not part of the analysis that produced the factors, which is exactly what Saucier and Goldberg have done. Gorsuch (1983) mentioned a good reason for doing an extension analysis that is particularly pertinent to the present discussion. Extension analysis may be needed to test a hypothesis regarding the nature of a particular factor. A well-replicated factor may be hy- pothesized to be that which is measured by variable Z. To include Beyond the Big Five 825 variable Z in an exploratory factor analysis would usually allow it to help define the factor. Because this includes the possibility of capitalizing on chance, it would be better to determine variable Z’s relationship to the factor when the factor is based solely on the other variables.
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