<P> In 1884, Sir Francis Galton was the first person who is known to have investigated the hypothesis that it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits by sampling language: the lexical hypothesis . In 1936, Gordon Allport and S. Odbert put Sir Francis Galton's hypothesis into practice by extracting 4,504 adjectives which they believed were descriptive of observable and relatively permanent traits from the dictionaries at that time . In 1940, Raymond Cattell retained the adjectives, and eliminated synonyms to reduce the total to 171 . He constructed a self - report instrument for the clusters of personality traits he found from the adjectives, which he called the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire . Based on a subset of only 20 of the 36 dimensions that Cattell had originally discovered, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal claimed to have found just five broad factors which they labeled: "surgency", "agreeableness", "dependability", "emotional stability", and "culture". Warren Norman subsequently relabeled "dependability" as "conscientiousness". </P> <P> For the next two decades, the changing zeitgeist made publication of personality research difficult . In his 1968 book Personality and Assessment, Walter Mischel asserted that personality instruments could not predict behavior with a correlation of more than 0.3 . Social psychologists like Mischel argued that attitudes and behavior were not stable, but varied with the situation . Predicting behavior from personality instruments was claimed to be impossible . However, it has subsequently been demonstrated empirically that the magnitude of the predictive correlations with real - life criteria can increase significantly under stressful emotional conditions (as opposed to the typical administration of personality measures under neutral emotional conditions), thereby accounting for a significantly greater proportion of the predictive variance . </P> <P> In addition, emerging methodologies challenged this point of view during the 1980s . Instead of trying to predict single instances of behavior, which was unreliable, researchers found that they could predict patterns of behavior by aggregating large numbers of observations . As a result, correlations between personality and behavior increased substantially, and it was clear that "personality" did in fact exist . Personality and social psychologists now generally agree that both personal and situational variables are needed to account for human behavior . Trait theories became justified, and there was a resurgence of interest in this area . In the 1980s, Lewis Goldberg started his own lexical project, emphasizing five broad factors once again . He later coined the term "Big Five" as a label for the factors . </P> <P> In a 1980 symposium in Honolulu, four prominent researchers, Lewis Goldberg, Naomi Takemoto - Chock, Andrew Comrey, and John M. Digman, reviewed the available personality instruments of the day . This event was followed by widespread acceptance of the five - factor model among personality researchers during the 1980s . Peter Saville and his team included the five - factor "Pentagon" model with the original OPQ in 1984 . Pentagon was closely followed by the NEO five - factor personality inventory, published by Costa and McCrae in 1985 . However, the methodology employed in constructing the NEO instrument has been subjected to critical scrutiny (see section below). </P>

Whose model of personality includes three main traits