Modified Five Factor Personality Type Model

I had earlier written about Predicting relationship success through the use of personality types. While I had read about multiple models none of them seemed quite right. 

In the Myers Brigs (MB) model, three parameters Sensing, Thinking and Judging seemed to overlap.

When I discussed this with my friend Guruji, it struck us that both MB and Five Factor Personality (FFP) models missed important factors like passion or fairness. These two attributes are important parts of a person's personality.

Additionally we had problems with the definitions of two of the attributes in the FFP: Openness (O) and Neuroticism (N). We took the definitions of the 5 attributes or factors from http://instantpersonalitytest.us/Personality-Ebook/Types.pdf. The five factors are Openness (O), Neuroticism (N), Agreeableness (A), Extroversion (E) and Conscientiousness (C).

We will define the factors here so there is no ambiguity:

Conscientiousness (C) is the trait of being painstaking and careful.  It includes such elements as self-discipline, carefulness, thoroughness, organization, deliberation (the tendency to think carefully before acting). Conscientious individuals are generally reliable. This definition was adapted from Wiki.

Neuroticism (N) talks about control of mood and negative emotions. And whether people are calm usually. Now how does one interpret this? Is a person who gets into conflicts often with others often high on N? I thought not since this is already covered under Agreeableness (A). So I would prefer to define N as the ability to remain calm, unworried, controlled and not depressed when not interacting with another individual, typically when the person is alone.

Other factors A, E, O will have the same meaning as in http://instantpersonalitytest.us/Personality-Ebook/Types.pdf.

Coming to Openness, it is defined as how a person is open to new ideas, actions, feelings and values. Here I sensed a problem. None of the attributes O, N, A, Conscientiousness (C) and Extraversion (E) talked about passion, intelligence and conviction to own thought or fairness.

We hence have a problem here. We are missing an attribute which would include passion, intelligence and conviction to own thought. A person with that attribute would explore more and more, he develop a better understanding, he would create. Other things do not matter. Lack of rewards does not matter. He would see rewards as being incidental. Let's call this Purpose (P). Persons like Hitler or Roark would have a very high P. King Harischandra would have a high P, he would not compromise.

Initially I wondered whether O and P are inversely correlated and hence basically whether the two factors were at opposite ends of the same attribute. I thought people would either want to experience new things or create new things. But I realized this is not so. I have seen people who have high O and P as well as people with low O and P. O and P are hence independent factors.

There are people who consistently do a great job but take up nothing new nor explore but do the same things exceptionally well. I would say these people are low to medium in P and high in C. An example of such a character may be Eddie Willers.

Again, none of the five attributes deals with Fairness (F), knowing right from wrong, to not ask for something that is unfair. Fairness has to do with purpose in life. What is our aim or philosophy? What do we expect from others in order to achieve this aim? 
Do we want special consideration (Yes)? Do we like to operate in a "free market"? Do we deserve what we want (No)? Do we think our needs give us a right to certain things (Yes)? Do we like to follow the same rules we expect others to follow (No)? If the answers to the questions are as mentioned in the brackets then we are low in F. We included Fairness as a 6th attribute while also redefining O and N. With this we believe that we may have a comprehensive set of minimal factors that define a person's personality. Hitler, Ellsworth Toohey and Gail Wynand would both rate low in F.

Thus we have the taken the basic FFP model and we have modified the definitions of C and N, we added two new factors P and F. We retained A, E and O as they were.

Henry Cameron in Fountainhead would have low O, A, E, N and high P, C, F initially. When his career was over he felt defeated, his P would have been low and N high. I believe P and N are negatively correlated.

We propose to see whether we can use this Modified Factor Personality (MFP) to define people well. And this means that two people who have the same scores in all the factors (P O N A C E F) cannot be different in their personalities. I would assume that these factors are independent of each other and having a high value in any one factor does not mean that the person would hence have a high/low value in another factor. To that extent N is a derived parameter. One wonders whether N should be retained or removed from the list of factors.

The next step is to see which factors when mismatched between two people will cause the maximum conflict between them.

Additional reading: http://vbala99.blogspot.in/2010/09/big-five-personality-test.html