 2. History, Measurement, and Conceptual Elaboration of the Big‑Five Trait Taxonomy  55
in common (mean corrected r = .81); only 
one correlation (for Conscientiousness) ex -
ceeded .90, and those for Neuroticism and 
Agreeableness did not even reach .80, sug -
gesting that the conceptualization of four of 
the Big Five dimensions is not fully equiva -
lent across these two instruments. On aver -
age, then, the BFI converged much better 
with both TDA and NEO-FFI than did TDA 
and NEO-FFI with each other. However, in 
contrast to Hampson and Goldberg’s (2006) 
impression, the empirical findings show that 
the BFI does not simply occupy an interme -
diate position between the lexically derived 
TDA and the questionnaire-  based NEO-
FFI. Instead, the pattern of convergence cor -
relations depends on the Big Five domain: 
The BFI achieved practical equivalence with 
the TDA for Extraversion and Conscien -
tiousness, whereas the convergence with the 
NEO-FFI was greatest for Agreeableness, 
Conscientiousness, and Openness.
Discriminant  Correlations
Overall, discriminant correlations were low, 
with absolute values averaging less than .25 
overall. Moreover, none of the discriminant 
correlations reached .40 on any of the in -
struments. Thus, there was little support 
for Eysenck’s (1992) contention that Agree -
ableness and Conscientiousness are highly 
correlated “primary” traits that should be 
combined into a broader dimension con -
trasting Eysenck’s Psychoticism with what 
might be called “good character.” The size 
of these intercorrelations should also damp -
en some of the enthusiasm (e.g., DeYoung, 
2006; Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005) 
for higher-  order factors above the Big Five 
(Digman, 1997). Yes, as has been noted 
repeatedly (e.g., John & Srivastava, 1999; 
Paulhus & John, 1998), the Big Five dimen -
sions, as assessed by human self- and peer 
observers, are not strictly orthogonal. How -
ever, the size of these intercorrelations rep -
resents barely 10% shared variance—  hardly 
enough, it would seem, to support the two 
substantively interpreted superordinate fac -
tors initially reported by Digman (1997). 
An alternative view has been proposed by 
Paulhus and John (1998), who showed that 
at least some of that covariance may be ex -plained in terms of self-  enhancing biases in 
self- reports.
Together, the findings in this section show 
that the Big Five are fairly independent di -
mensions that can be measured by several 
instruments with impressive convergent and 
discriminant validity.
Convergent and  Discriminant Associations 
across  Instruments at  the Facet  Level
So far, we have examined how well the 
broad Big Five domains are measured across 
three of the most commonly used and best 
validated instruments available to research -
ers. Much less is known about the facets that 
define each of the Big Five at a lower level 
of abstraction but progress is being made. 
In fact, Table 2.3 proposes a number of hy -
potheses about convergence and discrimina -
tion at the facet level, and these hypotheses 
can be tested empirically. Of the instruments 
included in Soto and John’s (2017a, Study 
3) data set described above, three measure 
lower-level constructs: the BFAS measures 
two aspects for each Big Five domain, the 
BFI-2 measures three facets for each, and 
the NEO-PI-R measures six facets for each. 
Given the rather different number of con -
structs included in each, correspondences 
cannot be perfect. Still, we can ask whether 
we find evidence for the patterns of conver -
gences across instruments predicted in Table 
2.3. Moreover, we wondered whether the 
facets that belong to the same domain (i.e., 
they are all positively correlated with each 
other because they relate to the superordi -
nate Big Five factor) are nonetheless suffi -
ciently distinct to show discriminant rela -
tions to each other.
To examine these issues from the per -
spective of the newest measure, namely the 
BFI-2, we computed the correlations of each 
BFI-2 facet scale with the two BFAS aspects 
and the six NEO-PI-R facets in the same 
domain. Overall, convergence was quite 
strong. Moreover, each BFI-2 facet showed a 
distinctive profile of associations across the 
8 BFAS and NEO PI-R scales. To illustrate 
the findings, Figure 2.2 presents the results 
as a profile of 8 convergent and discrimi -
nant correlations for Conscientiousness and 
Agreeableness.