My last post introduced the “Big Five” or “Five-Factor” model of personality traits and offered a glimpse of the way personality insights can be useful for donor segmentation and campaign messaging.

We’re sticking with these topics in this post but going a little deeper.

A Brief History of the Big Five

I want to first impress upon you how important discovering the Big Five was for social scientists and applied researchers alike. You see, once upon time, psychologists were faced with a very large and confusing mess of instruments for measuring personality attributes. I wasn’t around back then, but others have described those times as a kind of “Wild West meets the Tower of Babel,” where every personality psychologist promoted his or her own pet instruments and unique jargon. Researchers and practitioners couldn’t avail themselves to any solidly established rules for best practice.

One problem was that jingle-jangle fallacies abounded. Jingle fallacies occur when people incorrectly assume that different instruments measure the same trait merely because the instruments have similar labels. Jangle fallacies occur when people erroneously believe that different instruments measure distinct traits simply because the instruments have distinct labels. Complicating matters further, many scales were given labels that seemingly aimed at measuring a single trait but, after some scrutiny, were found to “blend” multiple traits under a single heading.

To be perfectly honest, personality psychologists still confront jingle-jangle problems on a semi-regular basis. But unlike the old days, we now have a widely-accepted taxonomy for sorting things out. You guessed it: The Big Five.

Let’s make this more concrete. Consider the words generous, kind, understanding and compassionate. These adjectives have related but usefully different meanings. An articulate person would know when to use one instead of the others. But here’s a key question: Are you sure that these adjectives represent four distinct personality traits?

Imagine that we asked one thousand people to rate themselves on these adjectives using a 1-to-10 scale, 1 meaning “not at all descriptive of me” and 10 meaning “very descriptive of me.” We’d most likely find that those who describe themselves as very generous also tend to describe themselves as kind, understanding, and compassionate. By the same token, those who say they are not at all compassionate would likely have lower scores on the other adjectives as well. In other words, people’s ratings on these adjectives would be positively correlated: scores go up together and they go down together.

Now, suppose we randomly picked one person from our sample, say, Jack. If we learned that Jack happens to be very generous, the safe money would be that Jack is also kind, understanding, and compassionate. And at this point, you may intuitively suspect there’s something about Jack, some general tendency or disposition, which is reflected in his generosity, kindness, understanding, and compassion. You may even come to believe that, linguistically useful as our four adjectives may be for specific circumstances, we’d be committing a jangle fallacy if we assumed that they represented distinct traits.

Factor analysis is a statistical technique that’s used to explain patterns of correlations among a large set of variables. In a factor analysis, variables that are highly correlated with one another get grouped under a common “factor.” The idea is that highly correlated variables share a common cause—their common factor. Factor analysis is one of personality psychology’s favorite techniques. It played a major role in addressing the jingle-jangle problem and the field’s eventual consensus around the Big Five or Five-Factor model.

Personality psychologists worked away for decades, conducting and interpreting the results of ever more impressive factor analyses. To make sure they covered as broad an expanse of the personality landscape as possible, some studies saw participants rating themselves on many hundreds of trait adjectives culled from dictionaries. This was actually a pretty good, objective strategy. It reduced the potential for researchers to unwittingly pre-arrange their results through prejudice in deciding which variables get submitted into their factor analyses.

Over and over again, regardless of whether the personality ratings were self-reported or provided by people’s peers, regardless of the language or any particulars about where the studies were conducted, and regardless of various other methodological considerations, five broad trait categories emerged.

Here’s a snapshot of a study published by Saucier and Goldberg in 1996. In this research, participants were rated on 435 adjectives. The results are presented here in a simplified form.

There are 45 adjectives in the table above but only five factors are required to explain the many correlations among them. This is the magic of factor analysis. If you look at the table for more than 5 seconds, a few additional points may occur to you.

First, you’ll notice that the Big Five are big. Each represents a broad domain, subsuming many specific tendencies.

Second, you may appreciate how the Big Five, as a scientific taxonomy of traits, is a great disambiguating framework. Many pop-psychology concepts are confusing because they represent a mishmash of two or more of the Big Five. Take “emotional intelligence” for instance. Emotional intelligence has been defined in a variety of ways (which is itself a problem), but it’s commonly invoked to describe something like extent to which people are able to recognize and appropriately deal with their own and others’ emotions. These characteristics overlap with Openness/Intellect, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

So what exactly are the Big Five? This is actually a deep question. Nobody predicted the existence of five broad trait categories. They don’t exclusively belong to any particular theory or theorist. The Big Five emerged over time in a “bottom-up” kind of way.

Are the Big Five mere statistical abstractions? Probably not. A common belief is that the Big Five are internal dispositions, tendencies to act, think, and feel in a consistent manner. Increasingly, researchers are coming to the idea that the Big Five reflect the different ways in which people’s brains are wired. For example, we all have a brain systems that enable us to empathize with other people’s pain, but some people’s systems—those we recognize as being higher in trait Agreeableness—may be more sensitive.

Personalized Persuasion

So, why should a fundraiser care about the Big Five?  Well, part of what we do in fundraising is try to persuade people to give their hard-earned money and time. It turns out that persuasive messaging is more effective when it’s tailored to people’s concerns. But people differ wildly in their concerns, so you’ll need an organizing framework for making sense of it all. And it would certainly help to use a comprehensive, scientifically valid framework rather than following some baloney fad. This is where the Big Five can be useful.

You can think of each Big Five trait as representing a basic set of beliefs or motivational orientations toward the world. Here’s an example:

Extraversion  The world is an exciting place; Have fun!
Agreeableness  People are vulnerable; Take care of them!
Conscientiousness  There’s work to be done; Get busy!
Neuroticism  The world is dangerous; Be careful!
Openness/Intellect  The world is interesting; Explore it!

Hirsh, Kang, and Bodenhausen published a study in 2012 that provides a roadmap for how you might consider using the Big Five in your fundraising. The researchers created five advertisements for the fictitious XPhone, each targeting a Big Five trait. Here’s a snippet.

Extraversion  “With the new XPhone, you’ll always be where the excitement is…”
Agreeableness  “With the new XPhone, you’ll have access to your loved ones like never before…”
Conscientiousness “With the new XPhone, you’ll never miss an important message, simplifying your work life…”
Neuroticism  “Designed to keep you safe and sound, the XPhone helps reduce the anxiety and uncertainty of modern life…”
Openness/Intellect  “With the new XPhone, you’ll have access to information like never before, so your mind stays active and inspired.”

Each of these advertisements was shown to 324 participants. After rating how effective they thought each advertisement was, including how interested they would be to learn more about the XPhone, each participants’ Big Five personality traits were assessed. And, lo and behold, advertisements were judged more positively the more they matched people’s personality traits.

Tailored messages are more effective than “one-size-fits-nobody” campaigns. But for tailored messages to be effective, they need to be based on valid characteristics about the receiving audience. So, consider using the Big Five and, if you haven’t already, you’ll want to check out our Zero Party Data series too.

Stefano

P.S.  Recommended Reading

DeYoung, C. G. (2015). Cybernetic Big Five Theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 33–58.

Hirsh, J. B., Kang, S. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2012). Personalized Persuasion: Tailoring Persuasive Appeals to Recipients Personality Traits. Psychological Science, 23, 578-581.

John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big-Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (Vol. 2, pp. 102–138). New York: Guilford Press.

Saucier, G., & Goldberg, L. R. (1996). Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives. European Journal of Personality, 10, 61–77.