The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The structure of phenotypic personality traits.
Abstract
This personal historical article traces the development of the Big-Five factor structure, whose growing acceptance by personality researchers has profoundly influenced the scientific study of individual differences. The roots of this taxonomy lie in the lexical hypothesis and the insights of Sir Francis Galton, the prescience of L. L. Thurstone, the legacy of Raymond B. Cattell, and the seminal analyses of Tupes and Christal. Paradoxically, the present popularity of this model owes much to its many critics, each of whom tried to replace it, but failed. In reaction, there have been a number of attempts to assimilate other models into the five-factor structure. Lately, some practical implications of the emerging consensus can be seen in such contexts as personnel selection and classification.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“In order to measure personality traits, we used a 25-item scale adopted from the international personality item pool [62] [40].”
From Watch, Share or Create: The Influence of Personality Traits and User Motivation on TikTok Mobile Video Usage (2020) · cites this paper as [40]
In the citing paper
“Following years of research, five stable and orthogonal factors (i.e., traits or dispositions) emerged from the data (Figure 1), which are now known as the Big-Five (Goldberg, 1990(Goldberg, , 1993)).”
From Beyond yellow flags: The Big‐Five personality traits and psychologically informed musculoskeletal rehabilitation. (2023) · cites this paper as Goldberg, 1993
In the citing paper
“FFM consists of five global factors or personality traits discovered due to lexical analysis rather than neuropsychological experimentation [33].”
From Interacting with a Chatbot-Based Advising System: Understanding the Effect of Chatbot Personality and User Gender on Behavior (2022) · cites this paper as [33]
Citations
Cites
THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS AND JOB PERFORMANCE: A META‐ANALYSIS
BARRICK, M. R., & MOUNT, M. K. (1991) · Personnel Psychology · doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.1991.tb00688.x · Cited by 8,689
An Introduction to the Five‐Factor Model and Its Applications
McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992) · Journal of Personality · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x · Cited by 6,835
Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.1.81 · Cited by 6,404
The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure
Goldberg, L. R. (1992) · Psychological Assessment · doi:10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26 · Cited by 5,530
Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study.
Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936) · Psychological Monographs · doi:10.1037/h0093360 · Cited by 2,018
The description of personality: basic traits resolved into clusters.
Cattell, R. B. (1943) · The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/h0054116 · Cited by 987
Extension of the Interpersonal Adjective Scales to include the Big Five dimensions of personality.
Trapnell, P. D., & Wiggins, J. S. (1990) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.59.4.781 · Cited by 707
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Items 101–120 of 120
Bjerre-Nielsen, A., Andersen, A., Minor, K., & Lassen, D. D. (2020) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797620956613 · Cited by 40
Bongelli, R., Canestrari, C., Fermani, A., Muzi, M., Riccioni, I., Bertolazzi, A., & Burro, R. (2021) · Healthcare · doi:10.3390/healthcare9081086 · Cited by 38
Understanding Patient Personality in Medical Care: Five-Factor Model
Redelmeier, D. A., Najeeb, U., & Etchells, E. E. (2021) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1007/s11606-021-06598-8 · Cited by 38
“Precise recommendations on how to treat a patient who has specific traits, however, are beyond the scope of this article because a clinical encounter is an interaction between the personality of the patient, the personality of the responsible clinician, and the personality of other involved individuals.(24) A large li…”
BackgroundMcAdams, D. P. (2010) · The Japanese Journal of Personality · doi:10.2132/personality.18.173 · Cited by 32
Education and Smoking: Confounding or Effect Modification by Phenotypic Personality Traits?
Chapman, B., Fiscella, K., Duberstein, P., & Kawachi, I. (2009) · Annals of Behavioral Medicine · doi:10.1007/s12160-009-9142-3 · Cited by 33
Is Personality a Key Predictor of Missing Study Data? An Analysis From a Randomized Controlled Trial
Jerant, A., Chapman, B. P., Duberstein, P., & Franks, P. (2009) · The Annals of Family Medicine · doi:10.1370/afm.920 · Cited by 29
Jerant, A., Chapman, B., Duberstein, P., & Franks, P. (2010) · British Journal of Health Psychology · doi:10.1348/135910709x464353 · Cited by 29
Chin, J., Desai, S., Lin, S. (.-H., & Mejia, S. (2024) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3637365 · Cited by 27
“Although CASA is based on how humans unintentionally personify computers due to mindless social behaviors, HCI researchers have taken this paradigm further and designed technologies based on human classification models, such as the Big Five [25], consisting of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,…”
MethodRuiz, F. J., Bianchi, J. M., Bastidas-Suárez, D. M., Ramírez, E. S., & Peña-Hernández, V. (2024) · Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science · doi:10.1016/j.jcbs.2024.100854 · Cited by 33
Artificial intelligence as a feedback provider in practicing public speaking
Isotalus, P., Eklund, M., & Karppinen, K. (2025) · Communication Teacher · doi:10.1080/17404622.2024.2407910 · Cited by 23
Sluggish Cognitive Tempo and Personality: Links to BIS/BAS Sensitivity and the Five Factor Model
Becker, S. P., Schmitt, A. P., Jarrett, M. A., Luebbe, A. M., Garner, A. A., Epstein, J. N., & Burns, G. L. (2018) · Journal of Research in Personality · doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2018.06.001 · Cited by 20
“Two leading models of personality are reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) (Gray, 1970, 1982; Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and the five-factor model (FFM) (Goldberg, 1993; John et al., 2008; McCrae & Costa, 1999).”
BackgroundDifferences Between Individual and Societal Health State Valuations: Any Link With Personality?
Chapman, B. P., Franks, P., Duberstein, P. R., & Jerant, A. (2009) · Medical Care · doi:10.1097/mlr.0b013e3181a8112e · Cited by 20
Manipulating the Perceived Personality Traits of Language Models
Caron, G., & Srivastava, S. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.156 · Cited by 20
Williams, M. K., Waite, L., Van Wyngaarden, J. J., Meyer, A. R., & Koppenhaver, S. L. (2023) · Musculoskeletal Care · doi:10.1002/msc.1797 · Cited by 15
Wyman, A. J., & Vyse, S. (2008) · The Journal of General Psychology · doi:10.3200/genp.135.3.287-300 · Cited by 14
Anvari, F., & Richards, D. (2015) · Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering · doi:10.5220/0005366600900101 · Cited by 9
Zaninotto, F., Bossi, F., Terry, P., Riccaboni, M., & Galli, G. (2022) · Frontiers in Psychiatry · doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.826277 · Cited by 7
“Neuroticism has been associated mostly with worry and stress (17–19).”
MethodFacet-Level Personality Relations of the Symptom Dimensions of the Tripartite Model
Khoo, S., Stanton, K., Clark, L. A., & Watson, D. (2020) · Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment · doi:10.1007/s10862-019-09763-w · Cited by 7
Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?
Schwerter, J., Lauermann, F., Brahm, T., & Murayama, K. (2025) · Learning and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2025.102761 · Cited by 3
Mathur, N., Rahman, H., & Desai, S. (2026) · Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772363.3798685 · Cited by 1
Metadata
- Authors
- Goldberg, L. R.
- Affiliations
- Oregon Research Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Goldberg, Lewis R.
- Venue
- American Psychologist
- Published
- 1993
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 26-34
- ISSN
- 0003-066X (ISSN-L)
- 1935-990X
- OpenAlex
- W1966732563
- Semantic Scholar
- c9e5ff2af5a184293feb8b5c4cdaf30d53694549
- Cited by
- 4,816
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 97 · 2025: 181 · 2024: 224 · 2023: 273 · 2022: 260 · 2021: 302 · 2020: 297 · 2019: 257 · 2018: 247 · 2017: 232 · 2016: 174 · 2015: 205 · 2014: 174 · 2013: 174 · 2012: 190
- FWCI
- 85.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Psychologist (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (5r01mh039077-08)
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH-39077)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Traits and Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Psychological Testing and Assessment
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
- Keywords
- Big Five personality traits, personality structure, lexical hypothesis, Francis Galton, individual differences, personality taxonomy, personnel selection, personality classification
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Individuality, Personality, Personality Tests, Temperament
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
