Understanding Personality through traits

In the last blog we understood what personality meant, in this blog we look at the "trait theory" of personality.

The trait theory - uses the traits as a base to understand the individual personality - Traits are the broad, general guides that lend consistency to behavior. There have been number of traits identified, but the some recent progress has identified that many of these traits can be reduced to a set of five traits. These five traits are called - "The Big Five" Personality Traits. These "Big Five" Traits are:

• Extraversion: The person is gregarious, assertive, and scalable (as opposed to reserved, timid and quiet)
• Agreeableness: The person is cooperative, warm and agreeable (as opposed to cold, disagreeable and antagonist)
• Conscientiousness: The person is hardworking, organized, and dependable (as opposed to lazy, disorganized and unreliable)
• Emotional stability: The person is calm, self-confident, and cool (as opposed to insecure, anxious, and depressed)
• Openness to experience: The person is creative, curious and cultured (as opposed to being practical and narrow interested)

This trait theory is not without criticism - the major of these criticisms is that, just the identification of traits by itself wouldn’t be of any use. It would be important to understand that personality is dynamic and not completely stable. The influence of situation too is something that cannot be ignored.