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Trait psychology is an accessible way of looking at personality science.
Explore the Big 5 OCEAN personality traits and the new Hexaco model with honesty-humility, plus links to personality quizzes.
Key Takeaways
- The Big Five traits provide a foundational framework for understanding personality differences.
- The Hexaco model adds honesty-humility to better capture personality nuances across cultures.
- Personality traits exist on spectrums and high or low scores are not inherently good or bad.
- Personality tests are tools for insight, not moral judgment.
- Exploring multiple personality models can deepen self-awareness and interpersonal understanding.
Summary
- Trait psychology simplifies understanding personality by focusing on key traits present in all humans.
- The Big Five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, each existing on a spectrum.
- Openness relates to curiosity and creativity; conscientiousness involves organization and attention to detail.
- Extraversion describes comfort with social stimuli; agreeableness involves cooperation versus competitiveness.
- Neuroticism reflects emotional instability, including anxiety and mood swings.
- A sixth trait, honesty-humility, has been added to form the Hexaco model, expanding beyond the Big Five.
- Honesty-humility opposes dark triad traits like narcissism and Machiavellianism.
- Personality tests like the Big Five, Hexaco, and Myers-Briggs help assess these traits but do not judge character.
- The video provides links to online tests including a combined quiz for Big Five, Dark Triad, and Myers-Briggs.
- Self-awareness and reflection are encouraged based on test results to better understand personality.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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See, we use traits in everyday life to describe ourselves, describe others, and our behaviors.
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But which traits bring us all together as humans and which ones separates us as individuals?
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So in the past couple videos, I've described how personality psychologists have narrowed down the infinite list of traits to the most important traits that are present in all people.
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These traits are usually presented on a spectrum, for example, extraversion is frequently a trait present in important personality studies, all people display some levels of extraversion, but some people are definitely more extreme extroverts than others.
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As personality psychology has evolved, the number of important traits has changed, the so-called happy medium has included five traits that are present in some degree among all people.
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In this video, I'm going to be talking about these five traits and the sixth one that has made its way into popular personality psychology.
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So, the original big five traits are also known as the ocean model or the canoe model, ocean stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
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So let's take a look at each one of these individually.
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The first one is openness to experience.
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Now, most of these traits are actually pretty self-explanatory.
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The openness to experience trait describes people who are curious about the world around them and they feel comfortable trying out new things.
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These people tend to enjoy creative activities and are more inclined to exploring different areas of life or alternative ideas.
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People who score low on this scale usually don't break out of their comfort zone very often.
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Different activities, routines, or ideas may make them feel uncomfortable.
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The number two is conscientiousness.
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And I know it's a big word.
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But people who are more conscientious tend to pay more attention to detail and they put more effort into organizing their everyday activities.
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On the extreme end, you might call some people OCD.
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These people are more likely to plan out every detail of a vacation itinerary or reread their work a handful of times before they turn it in.
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Now, on the other hand, people who score low in terms of conscientiousness are usually more likely to let things happen without planning or organizing.
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In fact, on the extreme end of not being conscientious, some psychologists call this impulsiveness.
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Now, this is a good time to reiterate that a high score on all of these traits does not make you a better or a worse person.
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Depending on your values and the culture that you're raised in, you may view conscientiousness as a positive or a negative trait.
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In fact, like I said earlier, too much conscientiousness is associated with OCD disorders.
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Now, it's important to remember that personality tests will not tell you if you're a good person.
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They just tell you which traits you have and how they influence your decisions.
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Number three is extraversion.
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So, extroverts are more likely to respond positively to the stimuli in the outside world.
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They feel more comfortable around lots of people.
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And whenever lots of things are happening around them, they feel refreshed and energized after they get done talking to a group of people.
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Introverts, on the other hand, prefer to eliminate outside stimuli and focus inward.
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They actually feel drained after they talk to a whole bunch of people.
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You can also find introversion and extraversion on the Myers-Briggs type indicator personality quiz.
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Which is something I'll talk about in a later video.
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Number four is agreeableness.
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People who are more agreeable are more willing to take action in order to make peace with others.
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Agreeable people are also more likely to be patient with others.
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These type of people might sacrifice what they actually want just for the sake of others.
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Or maybe to let go of angry feelings quicker.
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Researchers have put competitiveness on the other side of the scale here.
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So you're either agreeable or you're competitive.
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This trait still has some debate in the personality psychology world because honestly, not very many people want to be called disagreeable.
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This is why they have renamed it competitive.
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And lastly, is number five, neuroticism.
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Now, this is the final big five trait and it's also known as emotionality by other personality theorists.
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People who score high on neuroticism are more likely to experience tightened feelings of anxiety, paranoia, depression, or aggression.
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These feelings may have a large impact on the way that a person behaves or the way that they perceive the world around them.
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Now, just like the N in the pen model that I talked about earlier, people high in neuroticism usually have higher highs and they also have lower lows.
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Now, I also want to let you know that there is a new development.
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It's called the honesty humility trait.
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Personality psychology is always evolving.
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And researchers have recently added a sixth trait to the big five model.
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It's called honesty and humility.
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The addition of this trait has actually called for some tweaks to the acronym.
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Researchers have added an H to the big five, they started to represent extraversion with an X, and then they changed neuroticism to emotionality.
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And then they can change the acronym to form these six traits and they call it the Hexaco model of personality.
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Basically the same thing as a big five.
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The honesty humility trait was starting to be added when the big five started to expand beyond American studies.
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Researchers began to assess whether or not the big five were present in languages other than just English.
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And as the research continued, they realized that all of the big five traits were present.
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And honesty and humility kept appearing as an additional trait.
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Now, some personality psychologists believe that the honesty humility factor is the polar opposite of the traits found in the dark triad.
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The dark triad is another personality quiz that I'll be talking about next.
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So if you haven't already, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon.
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A person who is more honest and humble is less likely to be narcissistic, psychopathic, and a Machiavellian leader.
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Which are coincidentally the three traits that I'll be talking about in the next video.
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Not only does the addition of the honesty and humility reveal a person's tendency to tell the truth and play by the rules, it could also reveal who has a tendency to be manipulative or a seriously negative influence.
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So where can you find the big five and the Hexaco tests?
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Ashton and Lee, the psychologists behind Hexaco, have a test on hexaco.org where you can see where you rank for each of the Hexaco terms.
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And they even have a part of the website where you can actually assess a friend's Hexaco inventory by answering questions about them.
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Psychologists are still collecting data related to Hexaco inventory, so your results will be recorded and probably used in further studies.
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So you can go ahead and try the Hexaco test with that link in the description.
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But I've also developed a three-in-one personality quiz that you can take on my website, it's also in the link in the description.
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It combines the big five, the dark triad, and the Myers-Briggs type indicator personality quizzes into one quiz that you can take in under 10 minutes.
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So I highly recommend you to check both of those out.
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Give these tests a try and see what the big five results and the Hexaco results say about you.
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And if you want to, you can even share the results with your friend and usually you can get them to take it too.
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If you're surprised by your results or maybe your peers' assessments of your personality, then it might be time for some self-reflection and maybe some activities to increase your self-awareness.
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Thank you guys so much for watching this video, I really hope you learned something.
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And if you did, leave a comment below.
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Thanks for watching.
Topics:Big Five personality traitsOCEAN modelHexaco modelhonesty humility traitpersonality psychologyextraversionconscientiousnessagreeablenessneuroticismpersonality quizzes
