What's the "AHA!" REPORT all about?

This series of newsletters contains AHA! information to help people and organizations hire the best employees, make the best promotion decisions, retain the most qualified people, maintain the widest applicant pool, follow best practices, and (if you are subject to US law) remain aware of EEOC hot-spots.

In the News
Library
ERE articles
Media Kit

You might have heard about something called the Big 5: how it cures warts, never needs ironing, and comes with a lifetime warranty. Well, take everything you hear with a grain of salt. The B5 is just a personality classification system. It has been around for years – and is just now becoming a marketing fad.

A Brief History
Late 1800s: Psychology of the time was roughly divided between experimental studies and clinical treatment. Neither camp could define “personality.” Galton suggested analyzing words from the dictionary.

30s and 40s: Allport and Odbert (no relation to Dilbert) collected and analyzed over 20,000 dictionary words. Others follow. Arguments range from two broad personality groups to over 60.

50s and 60s: Fiske, Norman, Tupes, Christal and others generally agree that a five-factor model works pretty well. People begin to describe the factors as: 1) extraversion, 2) agreeableness, 3) conscientiousness, 4) neuroticism, and 5) an ill-defined “something else” referred to as culture, intellectance or openness to experience, depending on the investigator (the fifth factor is very confused).

1980s: Until this time, there were no personal computers and no off-the-shelf statistical software. Analysis was done manually. Digman programs a computer to teach a course in factor analysis. He uses data collected from the 30s through the 60s, performs a rotated factor analysis (don’t ask) and discovers five “parent” groups, each with a host of “child” personality factors.

Late 1980s to present: Costa and McCrae start an avalanche of publications promoting their test version of the B5. Everyone with an eye for test sales joins the cause.

Limitations of the B5
Although the B5 was supposed to be nothing more than a high-level organizing framework, people start thinking of it as the “Holy Grail” of psychology, the “penultimate discovery” of personality investigators!

Sorry, it’s just a computer model. For example, do you believe being artsy and being intelligent are the same thing? The B5 classifies both traits within the same factor.

The B5 is a general classification of all personality traits. It was NOT developed to predict job performance. Only three of the B5 factors consistently relate to performance: conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. In other words, high performance is associated with caring about work, liking people and not being "nutsy."

For almost every personality test, even these performance-related B5 factors have a very limited correlation with actual job skills – in the range of 2% to 4% of the variance. Thinking that the B5 will solve hiring and performance problems shows the same kind of logic as the joke in this commercial: "I’m not really a neurosurgeon, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!"

The B5 has not cured the common cold yet. But it has made a lot of money for opportunists (yes, I am jealous).