Mark Manson

So it wasn't until the 1940s with the very first early computer systems that you were even able to start processing some of this stuff.

And this is when you start getting some researchers taking that list of 4,500 words and then trying to use statistical and mathematical means to clump them into clusters to identify, okay, if we have all these words to describe human behaviors and human traits,

Clearly, like a lot of them must be similar.

A lot of them must be used interchangeably, right?

You can say somebody is a very exciting person.

You can also say that they're a very fun person, right?

Like those are two very similar ways to describe somebody.

And they're probably referring to slightly different surfaces of the same character trait.

So there was a guy named Raymond Cattell who was the first person to do this.

And he went through all 4,500 words and he boiled them down to what he called the 16 factors.

And these 16 factors were kind of the very, very earliest edition of today what we would call a personality test or personality traits.

Now, the problem with Cattell's 16 factors is that nobody could replicate them.

Researchers would go out and interview people and ask them a battery of questions and do the same statistical analyses that Cattell was doing, and they would get completely different factors than he was getting.

And this same problem continued to happen for the next 20 years or so.

There was a guy named Hans Eidensink who narrowed it down to three factors, but...

That seemed implausible.

There were a number of researchers in the 60s that also came down, you know, were able to narrow it down to, say, seven factors or six factors or five factors.

Now, interestingly, today, what we know is the big five, which is what all this is driving towards, was originally discovered by a couple Air Force clerks.

which is fascinating.

And the reason the Air Force discovered this was because they were studying fighter pilots.