The Five-Factor Model (FFM) is the dominant scientific framework for measuring human personality, describing individual variance across five broad continuous dimensions commonly remembered by the 📝OCEAN mnemonic: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The model was assembled through several decades of factor-analytic work in personality psychology, building on the lexical hypothesis — the assumption that the most consequential individual differences are eventually encoded into a natural language's vocabulary as descriptive trait adjectives. Researchers including Lewis Goldberg, Paul Costa, and Robert McCrae independently arrived at a five-factor structure when subjecting these adjective sets to dimensionality reduction, a finding which has since been replicated across many cultures and languages.
Unlike categorical type systems such as the 📝Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Five-Factor Model treats personality as a continuous, additive profile rather than discrete bins. It is currently the most empirically supported personality framework in academic psychology and is widely used as a baseline in research on academic achievement, occupational outcomes, mental health, and behavioral genetics.