The idea that people differ in fundamental ways of feeling, thinking, and acting goes back to ancient times. From the classic “four humors” of Hippocrates to contemporary models of the Big Five (or Five Factor) and the HEXACO (six trait), no one seems able to settle on what the magic number might be that captures these systematic individual patterns.
Most popular with personality psychologists now, the “Big Few” (i.e., five or six) approaches try to collapse all individual variations down to as narrow a range of numbers as possible. To be fair, the Five Factor Model does propose that there are six facets per each of the five basic traits, leading to a total of 30. Even so, if you think about capturing all of the permutations of human behavior that could possibly exist down to so few in number, it might seem a bit unrealistic.
The Small Many vs. the Big Few
Oddly enough, when modern personality theories were being invented in the 1940s or so, an entire branch of psychology completely rejected the idea of any consistent number at all. Extreme behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner argued that personality just didn’t exist. The reason people vary,…
