Page Index:     A Wondrous Ensemble     The Big Five (or Six) (or more) Personality Traits     Wrapping Up

Perspective, Behavior, and Personality are of an Ensemble of Parts

The essential thing to keep in mind about ALL biological traits is that, like a car, they are made up of many parts.

Personality and behavior is even more so. Although the car analogy is a good one, the example of the making of music is perhaps an even better one.

Consider the computer generated example at right.

In the making of music, many, many components are required. They work (play?) together. The way they are tuned, and their tempo with respect to one another can change the outcome dramatically. Break any one part, or de-tune it, and you may no longer have "jazz" or "funk". And yet no one part is responsible for the "jazz" or "funk". The style produced exists in the ensemble as a whole.

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The Big Five (or Six) (or more) Personality Traits

ConserveLiberty does not subscribe fully to any of the theories that attempt to explain the observations of human personality, perception, and behavior today. However, it would be helpful for many readers for us to give an example of one or two lines of current thinking while this resource's hypothesis and theories are being developed and illustrated. After all, we will leverage the thinking and insights of many insofar as repeatable (e.g. testable) research is offered. Similarly, ConserveLiberty will limit its declarations to those which are testable as well.

One example of a personality theory with a large body of data behind it is "The Big Five Personality Traits".

Wikipedia is a good, but not sufficient, place to start to begin getting familiar with the Big Five personality traits that the research community have uncovered using statistical tools to begin to discern the elements that make up human personality.

These five factors are:

• Openness to experience (openness),
• Conscientiousness,
• Extraversion / introversion (extraversion),
• Agreeableness, and
• Neuroticism.

One can remember these Big Five traits using the acronym "OCEAN". The theory that uses them is referred to as The Five Factor Model. These five domains have been used to explain most known personality traits and are assumed to represent the basic structure behind most of them. For example, click here.

The Big Five Personality Traits
Broad Domain	Aspects	Facets
Openness/Intellect	Openness Intellect	active imagination (fantasy) aesthetic sensitivity attentiveness to inner feelings preference for variety intellectual curiosity action (adventure) seeking
Conscientiousness	Industriousness Orderliness	sense of competence self-disciplined acts dutifully aims for achievement orderliness deliberateness
Extraversion / Introversion (continuum)	Enthusiasm Assertiveness	warmth energized/reserved excitement seeking assertive/reserved gregarious/solitary positive emotions
Agreeableness	Compassion Politeness	Trust in others Sincerity Altruism Compliance Modesty Sympathy
Neuroticism	Volatility Withdrawal	Anxiety Angry Hostility Moodiness/Contentment Self-Consciousness Self-Indulgent Sensitivity to Stress

Each of the Big Five broad domains (left) have two correlated aspects within them. And these in turn have lower level correlated facets, six each.

ConserveLiberty will post a more detailed description of each. You will be able to access each from this table and from the "Developed Filters" pages when available. Watch for them.

Because humans are genetically diverse (they generally mate outside immediate family, mating is sexual, and the genetic mechanism is designed to partition each of the genes from mother and father among the kids evenly as best it can) it can be very difficult to find two humans with nearly identical genetic make-up in order to assess whether various traits are heritable. Or, how they are heritable. A heritable trait implies a genetic basis or explanation as part of the reason we observe it. And, a genetic basis thus implies that organic structures are involved in the mechanism of action giving rise to the trait. For this reason, studies with identical twins are highly valuable, especially when environmental factors are also in play, or when the gene or genes in question are having only very subtle, or incompletely penetrant impact.

Twin studies do suggest that both genes and environmental factors equally influence all the Big Five factors to roughly the same degree. For example, click here.

The expression of the Big Five factors, and the traits beneath them also show differences based on age, brain structure, gender, birth order, and cultural environment. Understanding the mechanisms underlying personality, the way we experience and interact with the world is highly complex. It will keep those of us wanting to take rigorous scientific approaches to the question busy for quite some time.

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Summing Up

While The Big Five Personality Traits are a great place to start to explore some of the component behavioral traits that are put together to form our personalities, they are by no means comprehensive.

And, while there have been many other attempts and contributions regarding personality genesis and mechanisms elsewhere, for ages, there have also been approaches not taken.

ConserveLiberty endeavors to offer something novel in its approach to the genesis or mechanism of Personality Behavior and Perception. And so you will see this approach built upon in this resource as well.

ConserveLiberty has posted discussions of a few of its proposed Behavioral Personality and Perception Spectrum Filters in the chapter titled "Developed Filters."

A growing list of additional traits or filters that we will expand and elucidate in further updates to this section can be found here.

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