Personality Generator

What the personality generator does

You are after a personality. For a character, a writing exercise, a role-playing sheet, a prompt to push against.

This gives you traits. Pull a couple and see what kind of person shows up when you hold them next to each other.

And then read on, because these particular words have a history that almost nobody knows, and it is one of the strangest and best stories in the whole of psychology.

How to use it

Two or three is usually where a person starts to appear, so pull a few. Press Generate, then Copy to keep them.

Two men read a dictionary and found the shape of the human personality

In 1936, two psychologists at Harvard, Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert, did something that sounds like a punishment.

They got an unabridged English dictionary. And they read it. All of it. Cover to cover.

Their job, on every page, was to pull out any word that could be used to describe what a person is like. Not what they were doing. What they were like. Every adjective, every label, every quality.

They ended up with 17,953 words.

Nearly eighteen thousand ways that English has decided a person can differ from another person. Copied out, by hand, before computers, by two men, at a desk.

Then they published it as a paper called Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study, and that list is the foundation the entire modern science of personality is built on. Everything downstream, all of it, comes out of that.

Now the part that makes it worth telling.

Look at the words on this page. Original. Driven. Quiet. Outspoken. Reserved. Ambitious. Reflective. Optimistic.

Those are trait names. That is the same category of thing Allport and Odbert were copying out of the dictionary in 1936. This list, and their list, are made of the same material.

Which means the words in front of you are not a decorative pile of adjectives somebody assembled for a character sheet. They are the raw data of personality psychology, and you are about to be able to do the analysis yourself.

The idea underneath it

But why a dictionary? What made two serious researchers think the answer to what a human being is like might be sitting in a book of words?

The idea is older than they are, and it belongs to Francis Galton, who floated it in 1884. It is now called the lexical hypothesis and it goes like this.

If a difference between people actually matters, people will invent a word for it.

That is the whole thing. It is almost annoyingly simple. If a way of being different is important enough to change how you get on with someone, whether you trust them, whether you want them near you, whether you would work with them, then over the centuries a language will have coined a word for it. And if it matters a great deal, the language will have coined several.

George Miller put the general version of this beautifully: mountain people have a word for mountain, and people who live on the plains and have never seen one do not. The more important a thing is, the more words there are likely to be for it.

So the argument runs: a language is not a description of personality, it is a record of it. Every generation that noticed something about people and needed to say it left a word behind. The vocabulary is the fossil bed.

Which means you do not have to theorise about what a person is. You do not have to sit in an armchair and decide. You can go and count.

And that is the thing to hold on to. Personality psychology did not start with a theory of human nature. It started with two men, a dictionary, and a pencil.

How eighteen thousand words became five

Eighteen thousand words is not an answer. It is a pile.

So the next fifty years were spent shrinking it.

First you throw out the words that are not really traits. Things you are doing right now rather than things you are. Things that are judgements rather than descriptions. That takes it down to about four and a half thousand.

Then Raymond Cattell went at the synonyms. If bold and daring and fearless are all the same thing wearing different coats, you only need one. Four and a half thousand became a few hundred, then a few dozen, and Cattell settled on sixteen factors, which is where the sixteen factor questionnaire came from.

Then comes the good bit.

Rather than argue about which words belong together, you get large numbers of people to rate large numbers of people on all of them, and you let the arithmetic decide. If two words always move together, then whatever they are measuring, they are measuring the same thing. That is factor analysis, and it does not care what you believe.

Tupes and Christal ran it in 1961 and five things fell out. Norman ran it again and got five. Then other people, with different samples, different methods, different decades, different languages. Five, again. Five, again.

Lewis Goldberg eventually named them the Big Five, and Costa and McCrae built the questionnaire nearly everybody uses now.

They are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, and they spell OCEAN, which is the only reason anybody can remember them.

And this is the thing worth sitting with. Nobody designed those five. Nobody proposed them. There is no theorist whose big idea they were, in the way that the id and the ego were Freud's big idea.

They were found. Somebody counted the words, ran the numbers, and five shapes came out of the arithmetic. It was more like a survey than an argument.

Eighteen thousand words. Fifty years. Five answers.

Sorting these words with your own hands

Here is the thing you can actually do, right now, with the list on this page.

Sort them. Into five buckets.

Take Original, Artistic, Reflective, Adventurous. What are those? They are all about whether your head goes wandering. That is Openness.

Take Driven, Ambitious, Methodical, Cautious. Those are about whether you finish things and look before you leap. Conscientiousness.

Take Outspoken, Sociable, Enthusiastic on one side and Quiet, Reserved on the other. That is a single dial with two ends. Extraversion.

Take Empathetic, and think about where its opposite would sit. Agreeableness.

Take Melancholic and Pessimistic on one side, Optimistic on the other. That dial is Neuroticism, which is a horrible name for something that just means how much weather there is in your head.

Do it with a handful more and watch what happens. They keep landing in the same five piles. Not because we built the list that way, we did not. Because English did.

Every adjective you can find for a person turns out to be pointing at one of five things, and the reason is not that psychologists said so. It is that people have only ever cared about five things, and spent a few thousand years inventing words for them.

You just replicated fifty years of research on a tools page in about ninety seconds. That is not a criticism of the research. That is what a genuinely good result looks like: obvious once somebody has done the work.

Why the opposites are not really opposites

One more thing, because it changes how you use any of this.

Quiet and Outspoken are on the list. So are Cautious and Spontaneous, Optimistic and Pessimistic. It is tempting to read those as two kinds of person. The quiet one and the loud one.

They are not two kinds. They are two ends of one measurement.

Nobody is quiet or outspoken any more than anybody is tall or short. There is a dial, everybody is somewhere on it, and most people are somewhere unremarkable in the middle, which is exactly why the words at the ends are the only ones we bothered to invent. You do not need a word for average.

This matters if you are building a character. Picking Reserved does not mean you have picked a type. It means you have set one dial, and there are four more, and the four you have not set are where the person actually lives.

Reserved and Ambitious is a completely different human being from Reserved and Passive. Reserved and Adventurous is somebody who terrifies their parents quietly. The trait on its own is almost nothing. The combination is the person.

Which is why the generator is more useful when you pull two or three at once. One word is a label. Three words start arguing with each other, and the argument is the character.

How a word gets picked

Nothing clever.

The traits sit in a hand-checked list, each word considered on its own. Generate a random draw; within a batch, nothing comes up twice.

Everything happens on your side of the screen, and nothing is sent away.

Using these without kidding yourself

Pull more than one. A single trait is a sticker. Two that pull against each other is a person. Ambitious and Cautious is somebody's whole life. Enthusiastic and Melancholic is somebody you already know.

Do not build a character out of one dial. If everything you picked is about how loud they are, you have described a volume setting, not a human. Check whether your traits are spread across different things or clustered on one.

Traits are not behaviour. This is the bit fiction gets wrong most often. A trait tells you the tendency, not the action. Situations do most of the work: put anyone at a funeral and they behave like everyone else at a funeral. Personality shows up in the loose moments, the unstructured ones, where a person gets to choose. Write the loose moments.

The word is not a diagnosis. Melancholic is a description of a temperament and it is doing a job in a story. It is not a mental health assessment, of a character or of anybody else, and a page of adjectives is not the place to go looking for one.

Nobody is the same trait all the way through. The most useful thing about the five factor picture is that a person is a set of dials rather than a label, which means the interesting question is never what somebody is. It is which dial they are surprising you on.

Questions people ask

Is this related to Myers-Briggs?

Different thing entirely, and worth knowing why. Myers-Briggs sorts you into a type, one of sixteen boxes, and was designed by people with a theory. The five factor picture does not sort you into anything, it gives you a position on five dials, and it was not designed at all. It was found by counting words and running the numbers. That is the reason academic psychology uses one and not the other.

Why five? Why not six, or four?

Because five is what came out. Nobody picked the number. Researchers kept running the analysis on different people, in different decades, with different methods, and it kept collapsing to five. There are serious arguments for six, and the maths is not a law of nature. But five is the answer the data keeps giving.

Can personality change?

Yes, and it does, slowly. It also gets more stable as you get older, and it drifts in fairly predictable directions across a life. It is not a fixed thing you are issued at birth, and it is also not something you rearrange over a weekend.

Why is one of them called Neuroticism? That sounds like an insult.

Because it was named a long time ago by people who were not thinking about how it would feel to be told your score. It measures how strongly and how often you feel negative things. Everyone has a position on it. A very low score is not a prize, incidentally: some of it is just how much attention you pay to what might go wrong.

Does this work in other languages?

That was the real test, and it is why the finding is taken seriously. If the five factors were a fact about English, running the same procedure on German or Dutch or Filipino would produce something else. It broadly does not. The same shape keeps turning up in languages that had no contact with the research, which is a difficult thing to explain unless it is measuring something real.

References

1. Allport, G. W. and Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(211). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-2311-0_16
2. Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative description of personality: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216 to 1229. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216
3. Personality Traits. Noba Project. https://nobaproject.com/modules/personality-traits
4. An historical analysis of the lexical emergence of the Big Five personality adjective descriptors. Personality and Individual Differences. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886906003734