40 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
In the decade since the previous version 
of this chapter was completed (John, Nau -
mann, & Soto, 2008), about 8,000 new pub -
lications on the Big Five have appeared. As a 
result, we can now cover only a minute frac -
tion of all the relevant work in this chapter. 
Thus, our main goal is to provide a general 
overview and introduction to the field that 
focuses on the main issues and can serve as a 
useful reference resource. We therefore refer 
the reader to more specialized sources or re -
views as needed, many of them appearing in 
later chapters in this very handbook.
We begin our chapter with the history of 
the Big Five, including the discovery of the 
five dimensions in the natural language, re -
search replicating and extending the model, 
its convergence with research in the ques -
tionnaire tradition, and the development of 
various instruments to measure the Big Five. 
Then, we compare three of the most fre -
quently used instruments and present some 
new data regarding their reliability, valid -
ity, and interrelations. Finally, we address a 
number of conceptual issues, including how 
the Big Five taxonomy is structured hierar -
chically, how the five dimensions develop, 
whether they predict important life out -
comes, and whether they are descriptive or 
explanatory concepts.
The Lexical Approach and Discovery 
of the Big Five
One starting place for a shared taxonomy is 
the natural language of personality descrip -
tion, because it provides a common and finite 
source of attributes for a scientific research. 
This work, beginning with the extraction of 
all personality-  relevant terms from the dic -
tionary, has been guided by the lexical ap -
proach (e.g., John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 
1988). The lexical hypothesis  posits that 
most of the socially relevant and salient per -
sonality characteristics in a culture have be -
come encoded in the natural language (All -
port & Odbert, 1936). Thus, the personality 
vocabulary contained in the dictionaries of a 
natural language provides an extensive, yet 
finite, set of attributes that the people speak -
ing that language have found important and 
useful in their daily interactions (Goldberg, 
1981).Allport and  Odbert’s Psycholexical  Study: 
Traits,  States, Activities, and  Evaluations
Following Baumgarten’s (1933) work in Ger -
man, Allport and Odbert (1936) extracted 
from an unabridged English dictionary all 
the terms that could be used to “distinguish 
the behavior of one human being from that 
of another” (Allport & Odbert, 1936, p. 24) 
and identified almost 18,000 terms—“a se -
mantic nightmare” (Allport, 1937, pp. 353–
354) that could keep psychologists “at work 
for a life time” (Allport & Odbert, 1936, 
p. vi). Indeed, this task has preoccupied 
personality psychologists for more than 60 
years (for details, see John et al., 1988; John, 
1990).
Allport and Odbert found four kinds of 
person descriptors in the dictionary: (1) per -
sonality traits (e.g., sociable, aggressive,  and 
fearful ), defined as “generalized and person -
alized determining tendencies—  consistent 
and stable modes of an individual’s adjust -
ment to his environment” (p. 26); (2) tem -
porary states, moods, and activities, such 
as afraid, rejoicing,  and elated ; (3) highly 
evaluative judgments of personal conduct 
and reputation, such as excellent, worthy, 
average,  and irritating —although these 
terms presuppose some traits within the in -
dividual, they do not indicate the specific 
attributes that gave rise to the individual’s 
evaluation by others or by society in general; 
and (4) physical characteristics, capacities 
and talents, and other terms of doubtful rel -
evance to personality. Norman (1967) elab -
orated these classifications into seven con -
tent categories: Individuals can be described 
by their enduring traits  (e.g., irrascible), by 
the internal states  they typically experience 
(furious), by the physical states  they endure 
(trembling), by the activities  they engage in 
(screaming), by the effects  they have on oth -
ers (frightening), by the roles  they play (mur -
derer), and by social evaluations  of their 
conduct (unacceptable, bad). Moreover, in -
dividuals differ in their anatomical and mor -
phological characteristics (short), and in the 
personal and societal evaluations attached 
to these appearance characteristics (cute).
Allport and Odbert (1936) and Norman 
(1967) classified the terms culled from the 
dictionary into mutually exclusive catego -
ries, which gave rise to numerous classifi -