Why don't the Big 5 personality traits have more neutral names?

Question

Lots of different areas of study appropriate common-language terms as jargon words with a specific meaning in the context of that particular field, but the names of the Big 5 personality traits have always bothered me. They appear to be rather prejudicial.\n\nFor example, scoring high on Agreeableness *sounds* like it should be a good thing to an uninformed person. But from a psychological perspective, highly agreeable people often allow themselves to be taken advantage of, and tend to be emotional doormats.\n\nOpenness is another one that is confusing. Nobody wants to believe they are closed-minded. But in reality, a person who scores low in Openness is consistent, cautious, and deliberate in their actions, which is not a bad thing at all in many circumstances.\n\nLanguage has a tendency to bias our thinking in certain ways, and one would think this would be more of a problem in psychology than in other sciences. Other sciences either borrow obscure words from other languages or they make up new ones to avoid terms that are culturally or linguistically loaded.\n\nSince there is a growing body of evidence that the Big 5 are more innate than learned, and since each dimension is a scale on which either extreme is considered a bad thing, it would seem to me that we'd want to use less partisan names for those traits.\n\nWhy aren't the descriptors more neutral in tone?

Answer 1

The Big 5, also known as the OCEAN or Five-Factor Model, as far as I can tell, was purposely designed as a clustering of common language terms used to describe personality. The way we tend to casually describe other's personalities is not typically neutral. So it is sort of a statistical summary of the way we already tend to describe our personalities.

This is not to say this is the correct way to go about things. For one, as its based upon statistics and not upon any psychological theories, nor is there any thing of a neuroscience nature to back any of it up. Personally, I see the biased way that the binaries are framed (high neuroticism=all bad, low neuroticism=all good) as one of the biggest problems with it.

But this model stays popular because it is among the most consistent and replicable personality models to come about. Consistency is not necessarily accuracy though. And is it worth it for a test to be consistent if it is simply a summary of our own social biases? These are all good questions to be asking.