Los Cinco Grandes

Research & Results
OutOfService.com, created by Jeff Potter, has run personality tests since 1997. In addition to giving visitors instant, anonymous, and free results about their personalities, the answers gathered from test-takers have been used in collaborations with personality researchers at universities (scroll down to see paper abstracts).
Personality researchers look at how peoplebehave, and more specifically, how you and I behave differently. "Why do I act the way I do? Why do other people act the way they do?" While we'll never have perfect answers, researchers have developed pretty good insights into the broad answers about human personality.
Like all science, personality psychology relies on both theories and data. Imagine a researcher comes up with a theory to describeour personality. Maybe a hypothesis like: "As we get older, we become more conscientious (more careful, more thoughtful, more organized)." That's a pretty simple idea, but we don't know if it's true without some data to back it up.
One common way to see if a theory is true is to gather and examine survey data. Researchers ask a large number of people a carefully designed questionnaire and thenlook at the differences between answers. The Internet happens to be great for gathering survey data, which is why my website has been so useful to researchers!
Going back to the hypothesis I proposed above, imagine that I had a thousand responses for how conscientious people are, with half of the surveys filled out by people in their twenties and the other half from people in their fifties. Afterexamining the data, let's say that I find out that the fifty-somethings are indeed more conscientious on average than the younger group. That's good evidence that the theory is true!
But studies are never perfect, and scientists can overlook things. What if it turns out people in their twenties, who were born in the 1990s, are somehow different because of being born in the 90s? Maybe coming ofage during the Bush era caused these twenty-somethings to be less thoughtful, and the results we came up with had nothing to do with their age but when they were born?!
This sort of oversight is why you occasionally see scientists claim one thing only to turn around a few years later and find an entirely different result. In my example of older people being more conscientious, we can check ifit's age or year-of-birth by looking at data gathered across multiple years. After looking at the answers from exactly 132,515 people on this site, it doesn't appear to matter when someone was born for this particular finding. For now, we're reasonably certain that our theory about people becoming more conscientious as they get older is true.
Coming up with good theories that describe how theworld works takes time. As research continues, we create more accurate models, which leads to an even better understanding of who we are and why we act the way we do. Thanks for taking the time to learn about this research and for contributing by taking a test on this site!
Publications
Here are the studies that I've worked on. My role has been primarily on the technical side; I can't claim creditfor the research ideas and insights that my collaborators have gleaned from the data. I'm delighted to have provided the data that made the research possible and honored to have been included as a co-author.
I'm going to break tradition and not list these studies in strict chronological order. Instead, I'm putting those papers that I feel are more accessible to non-academics ahead of the others.Up first is...
People in New York actually are more neurotic than people in California! And yes, people in Minnesota really are nice...
A Theory of the Emergence, Persistence, and Expression of Geographic Variation in Psychological Characteristics
La psicología moderna considera que existen cinco grandes dimensiones (también llamadas rasgos o factores) de la personalidad que constituyen...