Why the Big Five, and not the other one.

Most personality quizzes sort you into a type with four letters. It’s enormously popular and it makes for good conversation, but it has a known problem: retest the same person a few weeks later and a large share come out as a different type. It sorts people into boxes that don’t hold still.

The Big Five — sometimes called the five-factor model — is the framework most personality researchers actually use. Rather than sorting you into a box, it measures five continuous traits that emerged repeatedly from decades of statistical work on how people describe themselves and each other. It’s stable over time, replicates across cultures, and predicts real outcomes including relationship satisfaction.

The five traits

  • Openness

    Appetite for novelty, ideas, art and the unfamiliar.

  • Conscientiousness

    Organisation, follow-through and self-discipline.

  • Extraversion

    Where your energy comes from, and how much you seek out company.

  • Agreeableness

    Warmth, cooperation and concern for other people's needs.

  • Emotional Stability

    How readily stress registers, and how quickly it passes.

The instrument

We use the IPIP-50, a fifty-item public-domain measure of the five factors developed by Lewis R. Goldberg and colleagues at the Oregon Research Institute. Ten statements per trait, half of them worded in reverse so that agreeing with everything doesn’t produce a flattering result. You rate each one from “very inaccurate” to “very accurate”.

This replaced our own earlier questionnaire, which asked you to pick one of five options per question. That format has a specific, fatal problem for a compatibility product: choosing one option means not choosing the other four, so the scores only describe the balance of traits within one person. They cannot be compared between two people, which means they cannot support a couples score at all. Rating each statement independently fixes that.

How we build a profile from it

Each trait comes out as a score from 0 to 100 and falls into one of five bands, and that band selects what your report says about that trait. On top of that sits the profile name: where one trait clearly leads, that trait is your profile; where two run close together, the pair is. Five traits gives five single-trait profiles and ten paired ones — fifteen in all.

What this can’t tell you

Your score is a position within the range this assessment measures — not a ranking against other people. Turning it into one would need a table of how the population actually scores, which needs a large sample we are still collecting. Until we have it, we don’t make that claim, and you should be sceptical of any test that does without saying where its comparison group came from.

The profile name is a description of which traits are highest for you. It is not a category that exists in nature, and it is not a diagnosis. Personality is continuous; the fifteen names are a way of talking about a shape, not fifteen kinds of person.

And no personality measure predicts whether a relationship will work. Traits are one input among circumstance, history, timing, and what both people actually decide to do. What the research does support is narrower and more useful: some patterns of difference reliably produce friction in particular places, and knowing where yours are is easier than discovering them three years in.

Norman Rehman
Clinical partner

Norman Rehman

M.A. · Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying)
College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario
Practising under clinical supervision

Norman is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, holding a Master's in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University and a B.A. in Psychology and English from the University of Toronto. He trained in the Gottman Method for couples work and specialised in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, after two years teaching in Ontario schools. Every profile on this site is reviewed against the research and signed off by him before it goes out.

Relationship practice
  • Gottman Method Couples Therapy, Levels 1 and 2
  • Solution-Focused Brief Therapy — graduate specialisation
  • Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT)
Education
  • M.A., Counselling Psychology — Yorkville University
  • B.A., Psychology and English — University of Toronto
Registration and membership
  • Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario
  • Member, Ontario Association of Mental Health Professionals
Additional training
  • Mental Health First Aid — Mental Health Commission of Canada
  • Psychological Health and Safety: Building Team Success — MHCC / Opening Minds

What the compatibility model rests on

The intuitive design for a compatibility score is “how similar are you two?” — and the evidence does not support it. Across three nationally representative samples, Dyrenforth and colleagues found that each partner’s own trait levels predict relationship satisfaction far more strongly than similarity does. Zhou found couples who differed more reported better relationship quality, particularly in longer relationships. So our index weights each person’s own profile at eighty per cent and similarity at twenty, which is less marketable and more honest.

References

Every paper cited anywhere on this site, in one place. There are 54 of them. Each one is linked to its DOI where the publisher provides one, so you can check any claim we make against the source rather than taking our word for it.

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