Many personality quizzes put people into types. But psychologists usually use a model called the Big Five. It has five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can remember them as OCEAN.

Everyone is somewhere on each scale, and most people are in the middle. Our personality can also change slowly as we grow older. For example, many adults become more careful and calm.

Instead of sorting people into types, many psychologists describe personality with five traits. They are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, often called the Big Five. The model began with an unusual idea.

Researchers collected thousands of personality words from the dictionary and found that they could be grouped into about five clusters. Each trait is measured on a scale, like height, so most people fall near the middle. Personality is not completely fixed.

A 2006 analysis of 92 long-term studies found that, on average, conscientiousness and emotional stability increase between about age 20 and 40. The traits are also linked to real life, although a link does not prove that one thing causes the other. For example, people high in conscientiousness tend to do better at school and work.

Online quizzes sort people into types. Personality researchers mostly use the Big Five instead. Often remembered as OCEAN, it places each person along five continuous dimensions, namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. It grew out of the lexical approach, which assumes that important traits are encoded in everyday language. When researchers such as Lewis Goldberg statistically analyzed large sets of personality adjectives, the words kept clustering into five broad factors.

The pattern held in many languages, though some studies favor a sixth factor, honesty-humility, for certain languages. Because each trait is a dimension and not a category, most people score near the middle. A 2006 meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples showed that in adults, conscientiousness and emotional stability tend to rise, mainly between ages 20 and 40.

Twin and family studies put the heritable share of differences between people at roughly 40 percent. That figure describes a population and says nothing about how much of one person's character comes from genes. The traits also correlate with real outcomes. In a 2019 preregistered study that retested 78 links between traits and life outcomes, 87 percent held up, although the effects were about 77 percent as large as first reported.