Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives

Studies of the natural language are a prime source of the Big-Five model, yet the factor analysis of a large, representative, and non-clustered set of English-language personality adjectives in a large sample has not yet been published. In order to test the hypothesis that finding the Big Five depends on biasing the variable selection with an investigator's preferred non-familiar terms, we present the factor analysis of 435 familiar adjectives in a combined sample (N=899) of 507 self- and 392 peer ratings. The five-factor solution reproduced the Big Five with high clarity, demonstrating generally very high correlations with Goldberg's adjective markers of the Big Five. The Intellect factor had a more moderate correlation, due to its de-emphasis of the creativity components of Factor V, a phenomenon that may occur commonly with the lexical Intellect factor.