Week 4: Personality Part 2

Question 1

Five-Factor Model

Answer 1

(also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits.
Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness,
Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Question 2

Openness

Answer 2

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things,
including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.

Question 3

Conscientiousness

Answer 3

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and
to follow rules.

Question 4

Extraversion

Answer 4

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and
assertive

Question 5

Agreeableness

Answer 5

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm,
and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their
own interests over those of others.

Question 6

Neuroticism

Answer 6

A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency
to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.

Question 7

Facets

Answer 7

Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For
example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so
forth.

Question 8

HEXACO model

Answer 8

The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth Personality Traits factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Question 9

Person-situation debate

Answer 9

The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality
traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which
started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which
personality traits are consistent across situations.