 2. History, Measurement, and Conceptual Elaboration of the Big‑Five Trait Taxonomy  43
birds include hundreds of distinct species, 
each Big Five dimension summarizes a large 
number of distinct, more specific personal -
ity characteristics.
Testing the Big Five in a Comprehensive Set 
of English Trait Terms
After a period of dormancy during the 1970s 
and early 1980s, research on personality 
structure has increased dramatically since 
the mid-1980s. Factor structures resembling 
the Big Five were identified in numerous sets 
of variables (see John, 1990, for a review). 
Nonetheless, because a number of these 
studies were influenced by Cattell’s selection 
of variables (Block, 1995), it was important 
to test the generality of the Big Five in more 
comprehensive variable sets. Norman (1967) 
compiled an exhaustive list of personality 
descriptive terms, and Goldberg (1990; see 
also 1981, 1982) used this list to clarify the 
composition of the Big Five factors and to 
test their generalizability across method -
ological variations and data sources. In a 
variety of analyses, the first five factors rep -
resented the expected Big Five and remained 
virtually invariant even when more than five 
factors were rotated. Saucier and Goldberg 
(1996) selected 435 highly familiar trait ad -
jectives; a factor analysis of these adjectives 
closely replicated the Big Five. Another thor -
ough search for factors beyond the Big Five 
showed that these five were the only consis -
tently replicable factors (Saucier, 1997).
Assessing the Big Five with Trait 
Descriptive  Adjectives: 
Simple  and Circumplex  Approaches
Goldberg (1990, 1992) distilled his exten -
sive taxonomic findings into several adjec -
tive lists, including a commonly used set 
of 100 unipolar trait-  descriptive adjectives 
(TDA). Goldberg (1992) conducted a series 
of factor-  analytic studies to develop and re -
fine the TDA, selecting only adjectives that 
uniquely defined each factor. These scales 
have high internal consistency. Another ad -
jectival measure of the Big Five was devel -
oped by Wiggins (1995; Trapnell & Wiggins, 
1990), who used trait adjectives to elaborate 
the two major dimensions of interpersonal 
behavior: dominance (or agency) and nur -turance (or communion). As shown in Table 
2.1, the first dimension resembles Extraver -
sion in the Big Five, and the second resem -
bles Agreeableness. Wiggins thus extended 
his interpersonal–  circumplex scales by add -
ing simple adjective measures for the other 
three Big Five factors (Trapnell & Wiggins, 
1990).
The circumplex approach has also been 
extended to a perennial problem in lexical 
research on personality factors, namely, to 
describe more clearly those characteristics 
that fall in the fuzzy regions between the 
factors. Using 10 two-  dimensional circum -
plexes, Hofstee, de Raad, and Goldberg 
(1992) devised the Abridged Big Five Cir -
cumplex (AB5C) approach to represent the 
two- dimensional space formed by each pair 
of factors and define eight facets in that 
circular representation that reflect various 
combinations of the two factors. The fac -
ets differ in whether they are more closely 
related to one or the other factor. For ex -
ample, there are two facets that reflect high 
Agreeableness and high Conscientiousness, 
but they differ in which of the two factors 
is given more prominence. The responsibil -
ity facet represents agreeable Conscientious -
ness, whereas the cooperation  facet repre -
sents conscientious Agreeableness (Hofstee, 
Kiers, de Raad, Goldberg, & Ostendorf, 
1997).
Cross‑Language and  Cross‑Cultural  Studies
The results reviewed so far suggest that 
the Big Five structure provides a replicable 
representation of the major dimensions of 
trait description in English across different 
types of samples, raters, and methodologi -
cal variations. Generalizability across lan -
guages and cultures is another important 
criterion for evaluating personality taxono -
mies (John, Goldberg, & Angleitner, 1984). 
The existence of cultural universals (Gold -
berg, 1981) would be consistent with an 
evolutionary perspective: If the tasks most 
central to human survival are universal, the 
most important individual differences, and 
the terms people use to label these individual 
differences, would be universal as well (Buss, 
1996). Conversely, if cross-  cultural research 
reveals a culturally specific dimension, vari -
ation on that dimension may be uniquely 