Hi, we're here from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about a big problem with the big five personality traits, an island that's full of

outrageously venomous snakes, and why wounds in your mouth

heal so quickly.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

New research may change the way we look at the Big Five personality traits.

And this is a great example of how even with the most rigorous science,

our understanding of the world is subject to change.

The Big Five is also known as the Five Factor model, and you've heard us talk about it before.

It's the research-backed set of five traits that professionals use to measure personality.

And researchers have also used them in a lot of scientific studies to analyze everything from people's leadership

potential to their choice of romantic partner.

You can remember the five traits by using the acronym Ocean, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Essentially, this model works because of a statistical method called Factor Analysis.

It basically takes a large number of variables and groups them

into a limited number of factors or larger variables that seem to explain each

individual variable. If a lot of people take the same personality test you can use factor analysis to tease out the few important traits that each answer maps on to.

So for example a question about how much someone likes change would map onto openness,

and a question about procrastination would map onto conscientiousness.

With all this data, the Big Five model has been pretty accurate

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