The Big Five personality test, as explained by Jordan Peterson, measures five core psychological traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Unlike type-based assessments, it places you on a continuous spectrum for each trait, giving a more nuanced picture of how your personality actually functions in the real world.
Peterson has spent decades teaching this model at the university level and applying it in clinical settings. His take on the Big Five cuts through a lot of the self-help noise because he grounds it in decades of peer-reviewed research rather than intuition or marketing. If you’ve ever felt like a personality test didn’t quite capture who you are, his framework might be the lens you’ve been missing.
Personality science is a field I came to late, mostly out of necessity. Twenty years running advertising agencies will force a certain amount of self-examination, especially when you’re an introvert trying to figure out why some leadership approaches drained you completely while others felt almost effortless. The Big Five gave me a vocabulary for things I’d already noticed about myself but couldn’t quite name.
If you want to situate the Big Five within the broader landscape of personality frameworks, including how it relates to MBTI and cognitive function theory, our MBTI General and Personality Theory Hub covers the full range of models and what each one actually measures. The Big Five sits in its own category, and understanding where it fits changes how you use it.
Why Does Jordan Peterson Prefer the Big Five Over Other Models?
Peterson is direct about this. He considers the Big Five the most scientifically validated personality model available, and he’s skeptical of frameworks that lack empirical grounding. In his lectures and interviews, he consistently returns to the same argument: the Big Five emerged from factor analysis of actual human behavior across cultures and decades, not from a theoretical framework someone invented and then tested.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. A 2009 study published in PubMed Central found that the Big Five traits show meaningful cross-cultural consistency, suggesting they capture something real about human personality rather than reflecting cultural assumptions baked into a particular assessment tool. Peterson cites this kind of evidence repeatedly when explaining why he trusts the model.
He also appreciates that the Big Five doesn’t sort people into boxes. Every trait exists on a spectrum, and where you fall on that spectrum has predictable relationships with life outcomes. High conscientiousness correlates with academic and professional success. High neuroticism correlates with anxiety and depression risk. These aren’t just interesting patterns, they’re practically useful for understanding your own tendencies and making better decisions about how you work and live.
For introverts specifically, the extraversion dimension of the Big Five is illuminating in a way that binary type systems sometimes aren’t. You’re not simply introverted or extroverted. You fall somewhere on a continuum, and that position has implications for how much stimulation you need, how you recharge, and what kinds of environments bring out your best thinking. If you want to explore how introversion and extraversion actually function as psychological constructs, the piece on E vs I in Myers-Briggs adds useful context, even if you’re approaching things from a Big Five angle.
What Do the Five Traits Actually Measure?
Each of the five dimensions captures something distinct, and Peterson’s explanations of them are worth understanding on their own terms rather than through a simplified summary.
Openness to Experience reflects your appetite for novelty, complexity, and abstract thinking. People high in openness tend toward creativity, intellectual curiosity, and aesthetic sensitivity. People low in openness prefer routine, practicality, and concrete information. Peterson points out that openness is strongly associated with political liberalism and artistic temperament, which makes it one of the more culturally charged traits in the model.
I scored high on openness, which tracks with how I’ve always approached client problems. In my agency years, I was the person who wanted to understand the cultural context behind a campaign brief before we talked about tactics. That drove some clients crazy. It also produced work that held up over time because it was grounded in something real rather than just what was trending.
Conscientiousness is Peterson’s favorite trait to discuss because it’s the single strongest predictor of long-term success across almost every domain. It captures your tendency toward organization, discipline, goal-directedness, and follow-through. High conscientiousness people finish what they start. Low conscientiousness people often have brilliant ideas they never execute.
Extraversion in the Big Five model is primarily about sensitivity to reward and positive emotion, not just social preference. Highly extraverted people are energized by stimulation, seek out social interaction because it genuinely feels good to them, and tend toward enthusiasm and assertiveness. Lower extraversion means a quieter baseline, less drive toward external stimulation, and often a preference for depth over breadth in relationships and work.
Agreeableness measures your orientation toward cooperation, compassion, and social harmony. High agreeableness people prioritize relationships and tend to avoid conflict. Low agreeableness people are more competitive, skeptical, and willing to push back. Peterson notes that agreeableness shows a consistent gender difference in the data, with women scoring higher on average, and he’s argued this has implications for understanding workplace dynamics.
Neuroticism captures emotional volatility and sensitivity to negative experience. High neuroticism means you feel anxiety, sadness, irritability, and self-consciousness more intensely and more frequently. Low neuroticism means emotional stability and resilience under pressure. Peterson is careful to frame this not as a moral failing but as a genuine psychological reality with significant life consequences.
How Does the Big Five Compare to MBTI and Cognitive Functions?
Peterson is politely dismissive of MBTI. He acknowledges it’s popular and that people find it useful for self-reflection, but he’s pointed out that it doesn’t hold up as well empirically as the Big Five. The type categories create false binaries where spectrums actually exist, and some of the sixteen types appear far more often than others in ways that suggest the model isn’t capturing independent dimensions.
That said, I don’t think the two frameworks are as opposed as Peterson sometimes implies. MBTI, especially when understood through cognitive functions rather than just letter combinations, captures something the Big Five doesn’t quite reach: the specific patterns of how people process information and make decisions. A cognitive functions assessment gets at the internal architecture of your thinking in ways that trait scores alone don’t fully address.
The overlap between the two systems is real but imperfect. High openness in the Big Five tends to correlate with intuitive preferences in MBTI. High extraversion in the Big Five maps loosely onto extraverted function preferences. But the mapping isn’t clean, partly because the Big Five measures traits while MBTI (at its best) measures cognitive processes.
One practical issue worth naming: a lot of people misidentify their MBTI type because they’re measuring behavior rather than underlying cognitive preferences. If you’ve ever wondered whether your type actually fits, the article on mistyped MBTI and cognitive functions is worth reading before you take Peterson’s skepticism of the system at face value. The problem he’s identifying is often with surface-level type assessments, not with the cognitive function model itself.
As an INTJ, my Big Five profile shows high openness, moderate to high conscientiousness, low extraversion, low agreeableness, and moderate neuroticism. That combination makes intuitive sense when I look back at my career. I was drawn to the strategic and conceptual side of advertising work, I followed through on commitments even when it was inconvenient, I needed significant recovery time after client presentations, I pushed back on ideas I thought were wrong even when it created friction, and I carried a fair amount of internal tension about whether my work was good enough.
What Does Peterson Say About Introversion and Low Extraversion?
Peterson’s treatment of low extraversion is one of the more nuanced things he’s said about personality. He doesn’t frame introversion as a disadvantage, though he’s honest that high extraversion correlates with certain kinds of social and professional success. What he emphasizes instead is that low extraversion people often have a different relationship with their inner world, one that can be a genuine asset in the right context.
He’s noted that introverted people tend to be less susceptible to the kind of impulsive social engagement that gets extraverts into trouble. They’re often better at sustained solitary focus, which matters enormously in creative and intellectual work. And they tend toward depth in relationships rather than breadth, which produces a different kind of social capital.
A 2020 study from PubMed Central on personality and well-being found that extraversion’s relationship with happiness is more complex than a simple “more is better” equation, with context and personal values playing significant moderating roles. That aligns with what Peterson teaches: your trait profile isn’t destiny, it’s a set of tendencies you can work with consciously.
What I’ve found in my own experience is that low extraversion shows up most clearly not in social discomfort but in how I process information. My mind works quietly, filtering through layers of observation before I’m ready to say anything. In client meetings, I was often the last person to speak, and what I said tended to be more considered than what came out in the first five minutes of discussion. That felt like a liability for years. Peterson’s framework helped me see it as a feature of how I’m wired, not a bug I needed to fix.
The cognitive function piece connects here too. Low extraversion in the Big Five often corresponds with a preference for introverted cognitive processes in MBTI terms. For people whose dominant function involves extraverted sensing, the complete guide to Extraverted Sensing shows how even that outward-facing function can operate with a quieter, more selective quality in someone who scores low on extraversion overall.
How Do Neuroticism and Agreeableness Show Up in Professional Life?
These two traits are where Peterson’s framework gets genuinely uncomfortable, because they describe patterns most people would rather not acknowledge about themselves.
Neuroticism in a professional context shows up as chronic worry, difficulty letting go of mistakes, sensitivity to criticism, and a tendency to anticipate negative outcomes. The American Psychological Association has documented how high neuroticism can function as a kind of threat-detection system, one that’s genuinely useful in environments where vigilance matters but exhausting in environments that require constant social performance.
Running an agency, I watched high-neuroticism team members produce some of the most careful, thorough work I’d ever seen. They caught things others missed. They also burned out faster and needed more reassurance than I sometimes had the bandwidth to provide. Understanding that their anxiety wasn’t a character flaw but a trait with real costs and real benefits changed how I managed those relationships.
Agreeableness is the trait Peterson discusses most provocatively. He’s argued that high agreeableness, particularly in professional settings, can work against people who need to negotiate, advocate for themselves, or deliver difficult feedback. Women, who score higher on agreeableness on average, face a specific version of this tension: the same trait that makes them effective collaborators can make salary negotiation and self-promotion feel genuinely uncomfortable rather than just strategically inconvenient.
Low agreeableness has its own costs. I score lower on agreeableness, and there were moments in my agency career when that showed up as a willingness to have hard conversations that needed to be had, and other moments when it showed up as unnecessary friction with clients who just wanted to feel heard before we moved to solutions. Peterson’s point is that neither end of the spectrum is inherently better. What matters is understanding where you fall and developing the capacity to flex when the situation calls for it.
Can the Big Five Change Over Time?
Peterson addresses this directly, and his answer is more nuanced than the popular notion that personality is either fixed or completely malleable. The Big Five traits do show meaningful stability across adulthood, but they also shift in predictable ways over the lifespan.
Conscientiousness tends to increase with age, particularly through the twenties and thirties as people take on more responsibility. Agreeableness also tends to increase with age. Neuroticism tends to decrease, especially for women. Openness shows a more complex pattern, sometimes declining as people settle into established worldviews.
What Peterson emphasizes is that deliberate effort can accelerate these natural shifts. If you’re high in neuroticism and you work consistently on managing anxiety through therapy, exercise, and exposure to the things you fear, you can move meaningfully on that dimension over years. The trait doesn’t disappear, but its expression changes. That’s a more honest and useful framing than either “you’re stuck with who you are” or “you can become anyone you want.”
The Truity research on deep thinkers touches on a related point: people who score high on openness and low on extraversion often have a particular relationship with their own inner life that shapes how they experience growth and change. For introverts, personality development often happens through reflection and solitary processing rather than through social feedback loops, which means the timeline and texture of change can look different than it does for more extraverted people.
How Do Thinking Styles Interact With Big Five Traits?
One area where the Big Five and cognitive function theory genuinely complement each other is in understanding how people think, not just what they value or how they behave socially. Peterson’s model captures the emotional and motivational dimensions of personality well. Cognitive function theory adds a layer about the specific patterns of reasoning people use.
People who score high on openness and low on agreeableness often show patterns consistent with what MBTI theory calls Thinking preferences, particularly the kind of analytical, systems-oriented reasoning described in the guide to Extroverted Thinking. That function is oriented toward external structure, efficiency, and objective criteria, qualities that tend to show up in people who are both intellectually curious and willing to challenge consensus.
At the other end of the thinking spectrum, people who score high on openness but with a more inward, analytical quality often resonate with what’s described in the complete guide to Introverted Thinking. That function is less concerned with external systems and more concerned with internal logical consistency, the kind of thinking that asks “does this actually make sense?” rather than “does this work efficiently?”
Peterson himself operates with what looks like a high-openness, low-agreeableness profile combined with a strong analytical drive. His willingness to challenge established frameworks, follow an argument wherever it leads, and maintain positions under social pressure all reflect that combination. Whether you find his conclusions persuasive or not, the thinking style itself is worth studying as an example of how these traits interact in practice.
If you want to get a clearer sense of your own type before layering in Big Five insights, our free MBTI personality test is a useful starting point. Having both frameworks available gives you more angles on the same underlying reality.
What Are the Practical Limits of the Big Five?
Peterson is a proponent of the Big Five, but he’s also intellectually honest about what it doesn’t capture. Trait scores describe tendencies, not mechanisms. Knowing that someone is high in conscientiousness tells you they’re likely to follow through on commitments. It doesn’t tell you how they organize their work, what motivates them at a deeper level, or how they handle the specific situations where conscientiousness conflicts with agreeableness.
The model also doesn’t capture values particularly well. Two people can have identical Big Five profiles and make very different choices because their underlying values point in different directions. Peterson’s own work on meaning and values draws heavily on sources outside the Big Five framework precisely because trait psychology doesn’t answer the question of what a person should do with who they are.
For introverts trying to use personality science practically, the most useful approach is probably to treat the Big Five as one lens among several. It’s excellent for understanding your emotional and behavioral tendencies. Cognitive function theory adds depth about how you process information. Your actual values and lived experience add the context that neither model can fully provide.
The 16Personalities research on team collaboration makes a related point: personality models are most useful when they inform how you work with others, not when they’re used to explain away conflict or justify fixed patterns. Peterson would agree. The point of understanding your traits is to work with them more consciously, not to treat them as an excuse.
One thing I’ve noticed across two decades of working with creative teams: the people who used personality frameworks most effectively were the ones who held them lightly. They found the insights useful without becoming attached to a particular label. The people who struggled were often the ones who used their type or trait profile to explain why they couldn’t do something difficult. The model is a map, not a ceiling.
How Should You Actually Use Your Big Five Results?
Peterson’s practical advice on this is consistent: start with your highest and lowest scores, because those are where your trait profile has the most predictable influence on your behavior and outcomes. If you score very high on neuroticism, that’s worth taking seriously as something to address through deliberate effort, not just accept. If you score very low on agreeableness, understanding how that affects your relationships and negotiations is genuinely useful information.
For introverts, the extraversion score is often the most immediately relevant, but it’s worth not stopping there. Your conscientiousness score tells you something about how you manage the self-discipline that introvert-friendly work arrangements often require. Your openness score tells you something about whether you’re drawn toward novel problems or prefer depth in a specific domain. Both have career implications.
The global personality data from 16Personalities shows meaningful variation in trait distributions across cultures and contexts, which is a useful reminder that your scores exist in a social environment. Being low in extraversion in a culture that prizes quiet competence reads very differently than being low in extraversion in a culture that rewards constant social performance. Context shapes how your traits express themselves and how others interpret them.
What I’d add from my own experience: use your Big Five results to have better conversations with yourself about what you actually need, not just what you think you should need. For years, I structured my work life around what I thought a good agency leader was supposed to want, which included a lot of social engagement, spontaneous collaboration, and visible enthusiasm. My trait profile suggested a very different set of needs. Closing that gap was one of the more significant professional adjustments I made, and it came directly from taking this kind of self-knowledge seriously.
Personality science, whether you approach it through the Big Five, MBTI, or some combination, is most valuable when it gives you permission to design a life that fits who you actually are rather than who you assumed you were supposed to be. Peterson’s contribution is making that science accessible and honest about both its power and its limits.
Explore more personality theory and type resources in our complete MBTI General and Personality Theory Hub.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is an introvert who’s learned to embrace his true self later in life. After 20 years in advertising and marketing leadership, including running agencies and managing Fortune 500 accounts, Keith now channels his experience into helping fellow introverts understand their strengths and build fulfilling careers. As an INTJ, he brings analytical depth and authentic perspective to every article, drawing from both professional expertise and personal growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Big Five personality test that Jordan Peterson recommends?
The Big Five personality test measures five core traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Peterson recommends it because it’s the most empirically validated personality model available, emerging from factor analysis of real human behavior across cultures rather than from a pre-existing theoretical framework. Unlike type-based systems, it places you on a continuous spectrum for each trait.
How does the Big Five differ from the MBTI personality system?
The Big Five measures traits on continuous spectrums and has strong empirical support from decades of cross-cultural research. MBTI sorts people into discrete types based on four dichotomies and has less consistent empirical validation, though its cognitive function layer adds depth about information processing that trait scores alone don’t capture. Peterson favors the Big Five for scientific rigor, but many people find value in using both frameworks together.
What does Jordan Peterson say about introversion in the Big Five?
Peterson frames low extraversion not as a deficit but as a different psychological orientation with genuine strengths, including capacity for sustained focus, depth in relationships, and resistance to impulsive social engagement. He acknowledges that high extraversion correlates with certain kinds of social success, but emphasizes that trait profiles describe tendencies rather than determining outcomes. Low extraversion people often excel in environments that reward careful, sustained work.
Can Big Five personality traits change over time?
Yes, though they show meaningful stability across adulthood. Conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to increase with age, while neuroticism tends to decrease. Peterson emphasizes that deliberate effort can accelerate these natural shifts. Consistent work on managing anxiety, developing discipline, or building social skills can produce real movement on trait dimensions over years, even though the underlying tendencies don’t disappear entirely.
Which Big Five trait does Jordan Peterson consider most important for success?
Peterson consistently identifies conscientiousness as the single strongest predictor of long-term success across academic, professional, and personal domains. It captures your tendency toward organization, discipline, goal-directedness, and follow-through. He also gives significant attention to neuroticism because of its strong relationship with anxiety, depression, and overall well-being, arguing that understanding and working with this trait is one of the most practical things a person can do for their quality of life.
