Beyond the Big Five – review of new models of personality structure

The paper is a review of current discussion on the Big Five model and new proposals of personality structure description. The discussion concerns three main claims of the Big Five model: (1) the claim about number of basic traits; (2) the claim about the organization of lower-level traits and (2) the claim about relations between the basic traits. Critique of each claim has led to a counterproposal that describes the personality structure in a different way. Critique of the first assumption is supported by the proposal of increasing to six number of basic traits in the HEXACO model (Ashton, Lee, 2001, 2007). Critique of the second assumption is supported by the proposals of different lower-traits organization. The Abridged Big Five Dimensional Circumplex (Hofstee, De Raad, Goldberg, 1992; Goldberg, 1999) and the model of 10 aspects located between the basic five traits and their facets (DeYoung, Quilty, Peterson, 2007) there are reviewed in the paper. The critique of the third assumption argues that the five traits are not orthogonal and the systematical relations between them can be explained by two higher-order factors (Digman, 1997; DeYoung, Peterson, Higgins, 2002) or even one General Factor of Personality (Musek, 2007; Rushton, Irving, 2011).