[ksbms]

Birthday Cat wrote good posts explaining some ideas regarding the Big 5. But let's not forget its assessment dimension is chiefly linguistic and it's just one model, although a popular one, among many others. In fact, there are many personality trait psychologists who disagree with proposed conceptualisation of traits. Thus, it's worth to bear in mind, its descriptive, explanatory and predictive power is of limited use for various reasons, even though it can shine some light in respect of interactions with others. After all, all these traits can't be literally observed in the brain, akin to analogy of Dennett's Cartesian theatre. All these traits are epistemic conceptual fictions, they do not, in fact, exist in the sense of existence of physical matter.