A contrarian view of the five-factor approach to personality description.

“Ignoring other psychological constructs can lead to wasted research efforts and hinders the accumulation of knowledge about psychological phenomena (Block, 1995).”

“Block (1995) for example has criticized the Five Factor approach as being too global to be of practical value in understanding actual behavior.”

“For example, numerous scholars have warned of the jingle and jangle fallacies, the former being the error of referring to different constructs by the same name and the latter the error of referring to the same construct by different names (Kelley, 1927; Block, 1995; Markon, 2009).”

“We further believe that the measurement of envy, like that of any construct, should stem from its theoretical conceptualization (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2016), and that methods to study envy should be theory-based, rather than primarily data-driven (see Block, 1995, for an analogous discussion regarding per…”

“Critics of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality have argued that the trait approach is in essence nomothetical, focusing on the study of differences between individuals, but neglecting the study of the clustering of variables within the individual (Pervin, 1994; Block, 1995).”

“Although the personality taxonomy used in this study provides a useful method for the organization of personality traits, it is not without detractors (cf. Block, 1995; McAdams, 1992).”

“Although the FFM has been criticized for various reasons (Block, 1995; McAdams, 1994), there is a strong consensus today that the five factors “do a reasonably good job of summarizing and organizing the universe of trait descriptors” (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p.”

“As we will discuss below, jingle-jangle problems at the construct level tend to create problems at the measurement level, and vice versa, leading researchers to get even more lost in the “jingle-jangle jungle” (Block, 1995; Peck, 2004).”

“This argument was partly a critique of the use of methods such as factor analysis to determine the nature and number of personality traits (see also Block, 1995).”

“The Big Five model has been often criticized for being purely descriptive and atheoretical (Block, 1995, 2010; Digman, 1997; McAdams, 1992; Strelau, 2002).”

“Personality research is sometimes criticized for focusing on relatively trivial items endorsed by 19-year-old adolescents living on college campuses (e.g., Carlson, 1971) or for obsessing over the intercorrelations of reified trait adjectives (e.g., Block, 1995).”

“Despite the impressive evidence supporting the validity of the FFM, there have been some influential critiques of the model; for example, see Block (1995) and Loevinger (1994).”

“Block (1995) criticises it for being atheoretical and the five-factor division as being arbitrary, while others propose different structures and typologies (see De Raad, 2009 for an overview).”

“Critics have argued against what they believe is the overreliance on factor analysis (i.e., one of the methods in Classical Test Theory) to uncover the latent structure of personality, without a wellgrounded theoretical basis and substantial variation in methodology (e.g., Block, 1995; Gould, 1981).”

“The consequences for research under this identity fallacy are: (a) confusion, misunderstandings, and conceptual mess (Alexander, Schallert, & Hare, 1991; Bong, 1996) and, hence, (b) difficulties in unifying a growing body of research and theory (Block, 1995).”

“Of course, if Carroll (1993) and Block (1995) were correct in their rejections of the reduction of ability and personality traits, respectively, one might need to reasonably consider a dozen or more separable abilities and perhaps a similar dozen or more personality traits (e.g., Cattell’s popular…”

“However, while there are some dissenters (Block, 1995), an increasing number of studies suggest that a consistent core of five personality factors—Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness—emerges in different cultures (McCrae, 2001; Paunonen et al.”

“Although some studies have argued for a framework consisting of less than five factors (e.g., Block, 1995; Eysenck, 1992), it is the FFM that has gained a lot of attention amongst researchers across different disciplines such as organizational science (e.g., Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001) and…”

“…its origins in factor analysis of everyday adjectives used by laypeople and may therefore omit personality constructs important to mental health professionals (e.g., quality of attachments, thought disturbance, characteristic defenses) (see Block, 1995; McAdams, 1992; Shedler and Westen, 2004b).”

“…evidence of the heritability of these characteristics, has led to widespread recognition of a five-factor model that comprises openness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness as fundamental personality dispositions (e.g., Block, 1995; Eysenck, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1987).”

“This may, at least in part, indicate a combined influence of (1) the more precise and contextualised description of the targeted problem in each item for the CSI-4 compared to the relatively shorter items of the OCHS-R and the Dutch items, which leads to relatively unequivocal interpretation of items by raters (Block,…”

“…making fine-grained distinctions such as between attitude toward ambiguity and theoretically overlapping constructs such as need for cognitive closure, has the potential to give rise to committing a jangle fallacy, in which the overcategorization of a construct lacks parsimony (Block, 1995).”

“Specifically, because the Big Five is a taxonomy, it attempts to represent a description of personality, not necessarily a self-appraisal of worth (Block, 1995; Digman, 1990; Judge, Erez, Bono, & Thoresen, 2002).”

“In spite of serious criticism regarding the number and nature of the factors (Block, 1995; Eysenck, 1991; McAdams, 1992), the FFM has currently become the most widely accepted working hypothesis of personality structure (McCrae & Costa, 1997).”

“As will become clear throughout the following review, change readiness tends to typify what Block (1995) has referred to as the “jingle and jangle fallacies.” In certain circumstances, change readiness has been used to refer to two phenomena that are qualitatively different from each other (i.e., the “jingle”), wherea…”

“…if this bold assumption turned out to be untrue, we would be at risk of obscuring underlying phenomena by incorrectly labeling them as the same mechanism, thereby engaging in an illusory essence bias (Brick et al., 2022) and/or falling prey to jingle fallacies (Block, 1995; Condon et al., 2020).”

“Some major personality theorists are skeptical that this particular source can yield scientifically valid constructs (for a review, see Block, 1995).”

“In fact, apart from a few notable exceptions (e.g., Block, 1995, 2001), disputes over the FFM’s legitimacy today are centered on issues of refinement rather than questioning the fundamental utility of the model.”

“To avoid the jingle-jangle fallacy (Block, 1995), we checked the underlying definitions and items of the various measures used in the original studies rather than relying on variable names to do these assignments.”

“Quite often, these newly discovered predictors strongly relate to existing personality factors, and fail to incrementally explain variance in important educational outcomes (MacCann, Lipnevich, Burrus, & Roberts, 2012; see also “jingle-jungle fallacy,” Block, 1995).”

“These criticisms of personality trait-identification research have not been lost on personality psychologists either, and trait-identification approaches such as the five-factor model have received searching criticisms for the reasons listed above, among others (McAdams 1992; Block 1995; Mischel & Shoda 1995).”

“This is sometimes referred to as the “jingle” fallacy (Block, 1995), in which different constructs bear the same name.”

“It is thus generally questionable whether “an oblique rotation, which inevitably fits the data points better, [is] truly a fairer representation of the underlying reality” (Block, 1995, p. 190).”

“…across the human lifspan, as highlighted via Cattellian structured personality-learning, would seem to necessitate a model other than the static Big Five approach (cf. Block, 1995; Boyle, 11 1993; Cattell et al., 2002; Romney & Bynner, 1992; Hough & Schneider, 1996; Schneider et al., 1996).”

“…the model’s development, its atheoretical basis, and its ability to capture the full range of personality have been cogently criticized (e.g., Block, 1995, 2001), the FFM provides a common language that fits our goal of describing broad personality dimensions that may be strongly associated…”

“Although these correlations contradict the often-claimed orthogonality of the five personality dimensions (e.g., Goldberg, 1992), they are in line with empirical findings reporting important correlations between the personality domains (see Block, 1995 for a comprehensive elaboration).”

“, 2018), such as the individual ability to spring back in the face of adversity (Jacelon, 1997), to deal with change and adversity (Wagnild & Young, 1993), and to bounce back or to be stable over time (Block, 1995).”

“This is not a new problem; indeed, it seems to be an iteration of the “jangle fallacy” (Block, 1995; i.e., multiple names for the same phenomenon)— and though we must, too, be cautious of the “jingle fallacy” (i.e., oversimplifying), at this point, more than theories, the field needs reliable data.”

“In this regard, traits can be considered as fuzzy sets with fuzzy boundaries (Block, 1995; Buss & Craik, 1983; Goldberg & Kilowski, 1985).”

“Equating a scale name and the construct assessed in the absence of appropriate evidence has been termed the “jingle fallacy” (Block, 1995)—the scale “sounds like” it should measure a specific trait, and this implied convergence is implicitly accepted.”

“The jingle-jangle fallacy in personality research (Block, 1995) refers to using the same name to different constructs (jingle; Thorndike, 1904) and using different names for equivalent or highly similar constructs (jangle; Kelley, 1927).”

“And while the HEXACO seems less conceptually problematic (cf. Block, 1995; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), we are nonetheless uneasy with measuring honesty– humility as a personality trait on par with the other Big 5 (i.e. extroversion, agreeableness, etc.).”

“…to the conscious (e.g., implicit, spontaneous, automatic, impulsive, fast, heuristic) and non-conscious (e.g., deliberative, reflective, reasoned, planned, intentional, slow, systematic) processes, and is at risk of becoming another jangle fallacy in psychology (Block, 1995; Hagger, 2014)!”

“In addition, personality variables were allowed to inter-correlate (Block, 1995).”

“where some authors argue in favor of the ‘Big-Five’ (Hendriks et al., 2003; McCrae and Costa, 1997), while others put forward serious criticism regarding the number and nature of the personality factors ( Block, 1995; Eysenck, 1991; McAdams, 1992).”

“However, previous researchers have criticized deviation from orthogonality in examinations of the NEO-PI-R (Block, 1995; Costa & McCrae, 1995), and that deviation was not of great concern to our overall findings.”

“…five constructs include not capturing all personality traits (John & Srivastava, 1999), the independence of the inherent dimensions (Eysenck, 1992; Block, 1995; Digman, 1997), a weak theoretical underpinning (McAdams, 1992; Loevinger, 1994) and a rather static account of personality (Terracciano…”

“Furthermore, although the Big Five or Five Factor Model certainly represents an important scientific advance in the field of personality, support for this approach is far from universal (Block, 1995; Widiger & Trull, 1997).”

“There is a general consensus that five core traits represent the basic underlying dimensions of personality: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (Costa and McCrae, 1998; see Block, 1995 for an exception).”

“Although the Five-Factor model has received criticism (Block, 1995), in the search for cross-cultural HRD literatures, considerable research has focused on the role of the Big Five personality variables, and it has been the most popular measurement among the HRD scholars in this regard (Nesbit,…”