970x125
If I asked you to describe your most important traits, what would you say? Do you see yourself as hard-working, high-achieving, or good with people? Chances are, you have some beliefs about what characteristics are at your core.
Perhaps surprisingly, this question has not been a focus of much work in psychology. Instead, researchers have focused on understanding a variety of personality traits. For example, the Big Five traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) reflect the most significant ways that people’s behavior and motivation differ from each other. Do the elements of the Big Five also define what people think is central about themselves?
This question was explored in a 2026 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Elizabeth Long, Norhan Elsaadawy, Erika Carlson, and Mac Fournier.
These researchers looked at data from over 4,000 people across four studies. Participants in these studies described up to three key traits that dominate their personality. In addition, they did inventories for basic personality characteristics. In some cases, the participants described the characteristics in addition to listing them. Also, in some studies, participants were also asked randomly over a two-week period to rate how they were acting at that moment related to several characteristics, including the ones they listed as central to themselves.
So, what drives people’s sense of their core traits?
While all participants had at least one trait they thought was central that was part of an inventory like the Big Five, many of the traits people thought were essential to themselves were not captured by these trait groupings. So, the Big Five traits may reflect the biggest differences in motivation and behavior between people, but they do not reflect the traits people necessarily think define them.
Instead, a few factors jumped to the forefront.
First, the traits that people list as being central to them are overwhelmingly positive. People see themselves as defined by positive characteristics (and sometimes positive characteristics they had to work to achieve). This shouldn’t be surprising. People like to think of themselves as the heroes of their life story, and that comes along with doing (and being motivated to do) positive things.
Second, the traits people think of as being core to who they are reflect those that are extreme relative to their other characteristics. So, people tend to see their fundamental characteristics as ones that stand out within the set of motivations they have. This is related to the ways that people see themselves as distinct from the people around them, but it is more inwardly focused.
Third, when people listed three traits, they could easily have counted different facets of the same overall characteristic. Someone who sees their extroversion as being central to who they are could have talked about being good with people, friendly, and engaging. But people generally selected distinct traits that did not come from a common category, suggesting that there is some diversity in what people see as driving them.
Fourth, when people describe their traits using more than just a label, their descriptions do not respect the technical definitions of the traits that psychologists use. Instead, their descriptions often include characteristics drawn from several traits that research treats as distinct. So, people’s experience of traits is somewhat different than the technical definitions of those traits.
Finally, despite people thinking of these traits as central to who they are, they were not good predictors of what people were doing when asked at random times what was driving their behavior. So, while these central traits are core to people’s stories about themselves—and likely do drive behavior when people have a chance to decide what to do—they are not constantly affecting what people do.
It is fascinating to start to understand what people think about their key character traits. There is still a lot of work to be done in this area, though. Studies need to explore the situations in which the traits people think are central have the biggest influence on their behavior. Research will also need to illuminate how people come to believe that particular traits are fundamental to them.
