About CB5

What is Personality?
Personality is the unique way in which an individual thinks, feels and behaves. These patterns of behaviour are typically persistent over time. These characteristics are responsible for individual differences between people.

Allport and Odbert (1936) conducted a seminal lexical study of personality terms from the unabridged English dictionary to describe individual differences. They identified 18,000 words. This was clearly a “Semantic Nightmare” and has kept psychologists working for a very long time. Several attempts have been made since then to measure personality.

In the 1980’s researchers in the field of personality assessment were faced with a bewildering array of personality scales to choose from with little guidance and no organizing theory or framework at hand. What made matters worse was that scales with the same name might measure different concepts and scales with different names might measure the same concept. Although diversity and scientific pluralism can be useful, systematic accumulation of findings and communication among researchers had become impossible amidst a cacophony of competing concepts and scales. What personality psychology lacked was a descriptive model or a taxonomy of its subject matter.

A taxonomy would permit researchers to study the specified domains of related personality characteristics rather than examining separately the particular dimensions that make human beings individual and unique. An accepted taxonomy would also facilitate the accumulation and communication of empirical findings by having a common vocabulary or nomenclature.

Tupes and Cristal, Norman, Borgatta, Digman and many others researched on clustering the personality factors identified earlier by Allport, Cattell and Eysenck. After decades of research there is now a growing consensus on a general taxonomy of personality traits – The Big Five personality dimensions. These factors do not represent a theoretical perspective but were derived from analyses of natural-language terms people use to describe themselves and others. The Big Five factors were discovered through a statistical procedure called factor analysis, which was used to analyze how ratings of various personality traits are correlated in humans.

In 1981, Goldberg termed them the “Big Five” not to reflect their intrinsic greatness but to emphasize that each one was extremely broad. Thus the Big Five model does not imply that personality can be reduced to 5 factors. Rather, it states that these 5 personality dimensions represent personality at a very broad level of abstraction. Each dimension summarizes a large number of distinct, more specific personality characteristics.

Several attempts have been made to measure personality traits using questionnaires. The availability of so many instruments to measure the Big Five makes it clear that there is no single instrument that represents the gold standard. The most exhaustive measure is the NEO –PI developed by Costa & McCrae (1985). The original derivations relied heavily on American and Western European samples. Researchers are still examining the extent to which the Big Five structure generalizes across cultures.

The CB5 is an Indian attempt to measure the Big Five using Indian norms.