Overlooked for three decades: A systematic examination of a problematic item in the 10-item Big Five Inventory

The 10-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10) is a widely used brief personality measure. We urgently report that its openness subscale (comprising two items) is flawed due to a linguistically ambiguous item: ‘I see myself as someone who has few artistic interests’. The word ‘few’ may be misinterpreted as ‘some’ rather than ‘almost none’. This ambiguity consistently weakened inter-item correlations across nine datasets (N = 6,640). To confirm that this stemmed from wording rather than concept, we developed a clarified item (‘…has hardly any artistic interests’), which yielded stronger correlations with the other openness item, higher test-retest reliability, and improved convergent validity. The flawed item may have biased the findings in studies using the BFI-10 and the longer 44-item version (BFI-44), particularly in research into openness and its facets (e.g., aesthetics). We urge researchers to reconsider prior findings, adopt the revised item, and safeguard against similar issues in future studies.