Global Five / Big Five Overview
The leading academic research model of personality is the Big Five, which implies five relatively independent personality elements. “Only five” in the sense that every other personality trait will have some correlation with one or more of these five key traits. “Independent” in the sense that what you score on one independent element says little about what you will score on another independent element.
Most personality traits are dependent, meaning what you score on one element will predict, to some degree, how you will score on certain other traits. This is why personality systems with dependent traits are not very efficient.
The Global Five personality system is based on the Big Five. The Global Five adaptation consists of Extroversion, Emotional Stability, Orderliness, Accommodation, and Intellect. These elements purport to make up the primary colors of personality; the interaction of the elements in each person yields their overall personality profile.
After many years of research, I've found some issues with this model. In particular, Extroversion is not unidimensional, meaning it seems to measure a mix of external reward sensitivity and emotional stability, among other things. The Big Five also fails to measure tribalism, a trait that is very influential in human behavior. I've addressed these flaws by constructing the MOTIVES personality system.
The Five Global Five Dimensions
Each Global Five element has two oppositional type extremes:
Extroversion
Social: feels at ease interacting with others.
Reserved: uncomfortable with and/or disinterested in social interaction.
Emotional Stability
Limbic: prone to moodiness.
Calm: maintains more level emotions.
Orderliness
Organized: focused and structured.
Unstructured: more scattered.
Accommodation
Accommodating: more oriented toward others.
Egocentric: more oriented toward themselves.
Intellect
Non-curious: less intellectually driven.
Inquisitive: highly driven to know and understand more.
SLOAN Notation
The SLOAN notation system is the scoring format used for Global Five typing.
SLOAN Notation Key
RCUEI = Reserved, Calm, Unstructured, Egocentric, Inquisitive
SLOAN+ Key
S|C|xan = strongly Social (S), primarily Calm (|C|), neither Organized nor Unstructured (x), mildly Accommodating (a), mildly Non-curious (n)
There are 32 SLOAN types; descriptions are listed here. Those 32 types do not fit everyone; they are merely 32 zones that cover much of the personality landscape. If you or someone else does not fit one of those types because you score in between on one or more of the Global Five elements, you can infer a description from the types you fall between.
There are an endless number of SLOAN+ types and, if plotted across personality space, they would leave no gray area.
SLOAN Tests
Online Tests
The SLOAN notation results appear at the very bottom of the results page.
Descriptions & PDFs
Global Five Printable Test (PDF)
Advantages of the Global Five
- Personality elements are empirically supported across multiple cultures by multiple researchers.
- Personality elements are comparatively clearly defined and unidimensional.
- Personality elements are relatively independent of each other.
- SLOAN notation allows quick, simple typing; SLOAN+ allows more complex typing.
Comparison With Other Personality Systems
Every other current personality system not based on the Big Five suffers, to some degree, from unproven, unclear, non-independent, and/or non-unidimensional elements. The various Jung systems (MBTI, Socionics, Keirsey, etc.) come closest in usefulness to the Global Five. Correlations can be found here, but those systems contain only four elements and say close to nothing about Emotional Stability.
At least two of the four Jung elements (Thinking/Feeling and Intuitive/Sensing) are not sufficiently unidimensional. For example, T/F covers aspects of Accommodation, Intellect, and Emotional Stability, while N/S covers aspects of Intellect and Orderliness. This means a T could be an objective thinker, a selfish jerk, a stoic, or some combination of the three; there is no way to discern that from the results alone.
The Jung systems also imply that everyone fits into 16 types. Most personality systems share some version of this “everyone fits one of our boxes” problem. With five personality elements, a substantially larger number of combinations is needed to represent people with even general accuracy.
A weakness of the Big Five theory is that there is some debate among researchers about what makes up the core of each element. To use a geographic metaphor, there is agreement about what region each of the five elements is located in, but different researchers might disagree on what precise city in that region is the core or keystone of some elements.
Nonetheless, as different as two researchers' labels or descriptions of something like Accommodation might be (some label it Agreeableness), their descriptions are still more similar than dissimilar. The differences, at their most extreme, are more like orange vs. red than blue vs. yellow.
While I think the Big Five was groundbreaking as a rational, empirical, comprehensive model of personality, I began to find flaws in it over more than twenty years of research. The seven-factor MOTIVES personality system is my solution to those issues.