Types of personality based on the Big Five

This project was done in collaboration with Milan Jordanov and Petar Čolović.

You have probably completed at least one of the many psychology questionnaires that are used in contemporary psychology. If you did and you liked it, or if you would want to learn more, check out this awesome individual differences project.

Questionnaires are usually built from theories that assume that all humans share a certain characteristic (agressiveness, empathy, openness to experience, extraversion, etc.) and only differ in how much of it they have. This is somewhat in contrast to the typological approaches that attempt to group people into types with similar profiles. One famous typology is the Asendorpf-Robins-Caspi typology.

In this study, we tested several hundred people in Serbia using the Big Five Inventory. We didn’t quite replicate the typology mentioned above, indicating perhaps some culture differences, but the results were similar.

We extracted three groups, as shown in the figure on top of the page (sorry if you cannot read Serbian). From left to right, they are the restrained, the unadapted, and the resilient. Different bars represent the five basic personality dimension from the Big Five Inventory. The restrained are average on all five dimensions. The unadapted have high Neuroticism, and low Extravarsion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness. The resilient are the mirror image of the unadapted.

We discuss the position of our typology to typologyies from other cultures in our full publication available here. The paper is in Serbian, but there is an abstract in English.