For HN readers that were turned off by the title ‘personality quiz’ and immediately jumped to the comments, these ‘big five’ are somewhat unfairly called a pers

For HN readers that were turned off by the title ‘personality quiz’ and immediately jumped to the comments, these ‘big five’ are somewhat unfairly called a personality quiz. These five traits are generated by putting hundreds of possible personality axes into statistical analysis to find those axes that are uncorrelated with each other. (By grouping those who correlate into the same bucket) In other words, there was no pseudo-scientist psychologist that hand-picked these. These five traits also seem to roughly map to individual distinct parts of physical human brain that we already know as distinct units to some extent, which is a good validation for anatomical science and statistical method used here. In short, these are the ‘primary colours’ of human psychology, and by mixing these in appropriate amounts, one gets the full spectrum of human personality. There’s also preliminary research, I think, that shows these five traits apply not only to humans but also to other higher functioning primates as well, but don’t quote me on that - I’m having trouble finding a citation for that one right now. This specific quiz on this website is actually too short to give out any statistically valid answer, the tests I have seen administered in an academic setting can last as long as 180 minutes. They’re pretty boring though, they ask very similar questions in slightly different wordings and phrasings to rule out a particular reaction to a specific word in the question.