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Explanation for your downvotes: GP's description is not a generalisation or pseudo-psychological, but reflects the current standard model of personality in psychology. http://enwp.org/OCEAN_model

Thanks for the link. Actually, I think the downvotes were somewhat deserved. I wasn't careful enough to set the proper tone of my critique.

In any case, I just wanted to point out here on HN we value those who back up their claims with good data.

You did this. So, thanks.

You may also have been thinking of Myers-Briggs which is pseudo-scientific nonsense and quite worthless given the ease it can be gamed when answering the questions.

I'm pretty sure the big 5 model was developed from data directly, not from a pre-existing theoretical model. I.e. they just made big personality tests and then checked how many factors there seemed to be, and it came out to 5.

The model is not without its fair share of criticisms. Check out this section on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...

How do you know? Do you have solid data to support your statement?