values. The clinician Carl Rogers (1961) had observed that some of his
clients were out of touch with their own feelings, and he proposed thatopenness to inner experience was a criterion of good mental health.Coan (1972) created a measure of openness to fantasy and aesthetic ex -
perience, and Tellegen and Atkinson (1974) noted that the capacity to
become deeply involved in experiences, which they called openness to
absorbing experience , was characteristic of individuals who were easily
hypnotized. We saw all of these traits as part of a single domain ofOpenness.
We created an inventory to measure specific traits, or facets, of
each of these three domains and conducted research with it for severalyears. Although it worked well in many respects, it shared with mostother trait systems the limitation that it was not comprehensive. Weknew that some traits, such as self-discipline, were not represented, butlike other researchers we had no clear notion of what other traits mightalso be lacking. Ours was a good model as far as it went—but how farwas that?
The quest for comprehensiveness led researchers back to the natu-
ral language. As long ago as 1961, two U.S. Air Force researchers, ErnestT upes and Raymond Christal, had conducted a series of studies usingthe 35 rating scales devised by Cattell (T upes & Christal, 1961/1992).Instead of the 12 factors Cattell had reported, they found only five—butthey found them in several different samples. Warren Norman (1963)recognized the significance of this finding and, after replicating the fivefactors in his own studies, suggested that they constituted an “adequatetaxonomy of personality traits.” Interest in this model waned, however,until Goldberg (1981, 1982) started the project from scratch, goingback to the dictionary and forming his own sets of synonyms—and rep -
licating the Five-Factor Model (FFM) once again.
Norman had called the factors Extraversion or Surgency , Agree -
ableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability , and Culture. When,
in the 1980s, we began to reexamine this system, we found striking par -
allels to our own. Norman’s Surgency was clearly our Extraversion, and
his Emotional Stability was simply the opposite pole of our Neuroti -
cism. If Norman’s Culture matched our Openness, then our three-factor
model could be nested within the FFM and the claim that the latter wastruly comprehensive would be considerably strengthened. Using adultmen and women from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging(BLSA), we confirmed these hypotheses (McCrae & Costa, 1985b,A Trait Approach to Personality 35