What is beyond the Big Five? Plenty!

In a recent analysis of personality data, Saucier and Goldberg (1998) sought to answer the question, What is beyond the Big Five? Those authors evaluated numerous clusters of English person-descriptive adjectives that have been suspected of referring to non-Big Five dimensions of personality. Their results led them to conclude that most, if not all, traits of personality can be adequately subsumed within the Big Five factor space. In contrast, our reanalysis of Saucier and Goldberg's own data, using a more realistic criterion for deciding on whether a variable does or does not fall within a particular factor space, contradicts their claim. We are led to the conclusion that there are plenty of dimensions of behavior beyond the Big Five. Few topics in contemporary psychology have generated as much research and theoretical interest as has the Five-Factor Model of personality. That model has been embraced not only by a personality psychologist, but by researchers in clinical, industrial/organizational, and developmental psychology as well. The Five-Factor Model, of course, posits that there is a structure to individual differences in human behavior, such that the traits of personality can be reduced to five orthogonal factors of personality-the so-called Big Five.