Welcome to the Big Five personalities study!

The Big 5 are a set of five prominent and independent character traits. They are based on semantic analysis of the most common adjectives people use to describe other people. Most of these adjectives can be grouped into five categories:

Openness (OPN):
A general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, ideas, imagination... Reflects the tendency to be open to experiences. The tendency to try new things and ideas.

Conscientiousness (CNS):
The tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully and strive for achievement, even against expectations. This is related to how people regulate and direct their impulses.

Agreeableness (AGR):
Reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. How concerned someone is with others or how self-interested someone is.

Extraversion (EXT):
How frequently person seeks out social contact and how in depth this social contact is. The opposite of introversion. Not to be confused with antisocialism.

Emotional stability (EST):
How prone a person is to mood swings and how easily one's surroundings affect their mood. A low score on this trait corresponds to high emotional reactivity.

Since the 1980s, this has been the most common model in psychology to describe, measure and compare our idea of "character" between people, countries, genders etc. Ideally, these character traits generally do not differ across borders, genders or ages. Of course people's characters can change throughout nationalities, sexes and years, but on average this should not have enormous differences.

Even so, systematic differences have been recorded, however small. This is part due to the fact that all the questions are to be filled in individually, so each person can interpret a question differently. These interpretations do differ based on lots of factors. A South-African fisherman leaving the bay "at around 10am, give or take an hour" will find this to be very much on time, while a Japanese metro having a 30 second delay is a disaster.

Are all these differences related to the way we interpret questions, or can there be something else at play? Are these traits a good representation of our idea of "character"? Are these truly independent of time and nationality? This dataset shows answers of the short 10-item Big 5 test, as answered by people across the globe. In this test, each character trait is related to ten short, introspective questions. Each question can be answered with a score of 1-5. The following visualisations explores the data of this test in hopes of providing more insight to these questions.