When It Comes to Personality, How Can We Count the Ways? |
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Personality theories debate just how many personality factors might exist and how they are organized.
A new study suggests that the “Big Few” fails to capture the many nuances that make each individual unique.
Turning to small variations rather than big categories may make more practical as well as theoretical sense.
The idea that people differ in fundamental ways of feeling, thinking, and acting goes back to ancient times. From the classic “four humors” of Hippocrates to contemporary models of the Big Five (or Five Factor) and the HEXACO (six trait), no one seems able to settle on what the magic number might be that captures these systematic individual patterns.
Most popular with personality psychologists now, the “Big Few” (i.e., five or six) approaches try to collapse all individual variations down to as narrow a range of numbers as possible. To be fair, the Five Factor Model does propose that there are six facets per each of the five basic traits, leading to a total of 30. Even so, if you think about capturing all of the permutations of human behavior that could possibly exist down to so few in number, it might seem a bit unrealistic.
The Small Many vs. the Big Few
Oddly enough, when modern personality theories were being invented in the 1940s or so, an entire branch of psychology completely rejected the idea of any consistent number at all. Extreme behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner argued that personality just didn't exist. The reason people vary, he claimed, is because they’ve acquired different “habits” through learning characteristic ways of responding based on exposure to environmental conditions. What’s more, because personality can’t be “seen,” it is unscientific to propose its existence at all.
Entering into this debate from a contemporary lens, University of Edinburgh’s Sam Henry and colleagues (2025) suggest that a potential middle ground exists in the form of personality “nuances.” Building a hierarchy from the top down, this approach to understanding individual differences involves starting with the Big Few (five or six), which then divide further into many more narrow qualities. In a Skinnerian way, Henry’s approach would then devolve into hundreds of “nuances,” or subtle differentiations somehow connected up at the top into those Big Few. You could take your pick of whether this would amount to five or six (or 30).
A fair question in this whole tempest in the personality teapot is whether any of this matters. Your new friend Charles has some unusual quirks that your friend Harriet does not. Does it matter whether they differ in five or 300 ways? Henry and colleagues would argue, obviously, that it does. But in a practical sense, how would this change anything about the nature of human interactions?
The answer seems to lie in the importance that anyone decides to place on empirically based ideas about human behavior. It’s much more convenient, if not satisfying, to be able to consistently predict how Charles, Harriet, and everyone else in your life will act, especially when you would like to maintain harmonious relationships with them. Imagine that one of Harriet’s little oddities (or nuances) is that she prefers to know someone well before confiding in them. Asking her a probing question before she feels safe is likely to backfire. Charles may be so open that he doesn’t even wait for you to ask the question before revealing personal details. In the words of the U. Edinburgh authors, “nuances [could] typically help improve personality traits’ predictive validity for life outcomes.”
The Evidence for the Nuance
Using a mega-size personality database of nearly 11,000 adults from six countries, Henry et al. were able to conduct a variety of analyses on individual HEXACO model items. Rather than fold the items into their respective scales, as is usually the case, the authors examined whether raters could agree on which items fit with which other ones, how similarly twins scored on them (to get a heritability estimate), and if they remained stable over a two-year period.
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In case you’re wondering what specific nuances might look like in behavior, consider these items that demonstrated significant age differences:
I would be tempted to buy stolen property if I were financially tight.
I think of myself as a somewhat eccentric person.
I get very anxious when waiting to hear about an important decision.
As you read these items, did it strike you that you would care more if one of your friends had a trait name applied to these sample behaviors, or just whether they felt that the item applied to them? How about whether they would apply to you or not? Maybe there is no need to come up with a broad label just for the sake of categorical elegance.
All of these individually based analyses led to one clear conclusion: Individual items provide information that is useful regardless of which “trait” they represent. In the words of the authors, there is “a jarring consistency among the emerging findings that is nothing short of remarkable.” The consistency, quoting further, shows “that there is far more to personality than a few broad trait domains.”
Putting the Findings to Use
Depending on whether you’re a fan of parsimony or prefer the messiness of a nuance, you may find the “jarring consistency” to be “jarring" indeed. However, the author team believes that this identification of the nuance’s value in capturing individual variations should be quite comforting.
Not only can this focus on nuances have theoretical value, as the authors propose, but it can also give the average nonpsychologist some useful tools for understanding those Charles and Harriet types of differences. You don’t need to decide whether Charles is “extraverted” or Harriet is “neurotic.” You have their past behavior as a ready tool to predict their future behavior. No elaborate vocabulary is needed.
To sum up, personality theories certainly have their place in psychology and can have value as a way of setting up some organizing principles for understanding human behavior and its many variations. But the possibility that personality is made up of nuances rather than the “Big Few” can also give you greater appreciation for the qualities that make each individual unique.
Henry, S., Baker, W., Bratko, D., Jern, P., Kandler, C., Tybur, J. M., de Vries, R. E., Wesseldijk, L. W., Zapko-Willmes, A., Booth, T., & Mõttus, R. (2025). Nuanced HEXACO: A meta-analysis of HEXACO cross-rater agreement, heritability, and rank-order stability. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(12), 2425–2444. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241253637