The Big Five Trait Theory is used to describe the five core traits of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits are often used to help predict relationships between different personality types, as well as predictors of success in different aspects of life (Psychology Today, 2018).
Ackerman (2017) argues that the Big 5 traits have been verified across different cultures and countries, thus making them relatively neutral in terms of culture bias, and findings involving the traits to be more or less universal.
In practice, the Big 5 is used in settings such as human resources departments, rather than as a comprehensive explanation of personality. For example, conscientiousness was found to be reliably correlated with success in the workplace, moreso than other traits. So an HR department might run an entire test but only be looking for a high conscientiousness score. The Big 5 trait theory is not sufficient to encompass all aspects of a personality, however. They might be the "Big 5" but even if one accepts that proposition that does not mean that they are the only five aspects...
The reality is that there are more than five types of people in this world, and this test is often overly simplistic in terms of how it describes a person.
Taking the Big 5 personality test is one thing – anybody can take a test – but if it is being used for anything that matters – like a job application – then I would not. When one looks at the scientific study of the Big 5 traits, the meta-analyses focus on linking the traits to things like job satisfaction, subjective well-being, transformational leadership, artistic creativity, substance abuse disorders and those sorts of things. Examining links between the Big 5 traits and specific outcomes is not unreasonable, but there do not appear to be any studies that test who accurate the Big 5 test is. To me, if you are going to distill my essence down to a quiz, then I would rather than this quiz be scientifically proven to have a high rate of accuracy. I'm not interested in being judged on the basis of a test that isn't going to accurately reflect who I am, and to this point the studies on Big 5 appear to have shied away from…
