I appreciate your response, but think I'd have to read more to be nearly as convinced as you. I'm familiar with the critiques you mention, but your conclusion as to the model's merits go beyond what I've seen other critiques make. As a model grounded in theory it is lacking, but as an explanatory construct to predict patterns of behavior and outcomes in specific settings (e.g., knowledge work) it persists for a reason. I've peer reviewed papers criticizing it, but none "debunking" it.
Personally my biggest gripe personally is that it is represented as a model of total personality, but that's definitely not true. It's just just representing a larger "personality space" than most other constructs. At least the outcome isn't placing one into a discrete category.
When I was doing psychology over a decade ago personality psychology was actually my biggest gripe. The way that I saw it, was that it wasn’t explaining anything which didn’t have better explanation using a different theory.
Now a decade later—being a little more class conscious—I can actually see how this is problematic. When a better explanation can come from sociology and has to do with class and economic status, measuring people based on a theory that lacks justification to justify one hire over another is problematic. When you ascribe it was because of an operationally defined concept (read: made up; based on data analysis) and name it personality that seems like a lame excuse to hire from your ingroup and excluding your outgroup.
These tests are robust, I know that, however robustness alone is not enough to justify a theory. These tools might be useful (or they may be dangerous) but while there is no justification for the operationally defined terms it cannot be used to justify terms outside of the model. That is pseudoscience. You can only to explain things inside of the model, and as such it is pretty limited as a theory.
I agree that the label "personality" unreasonably implies some sort of real (possibly for many, "genetic") truth.
> When a better explanation can come from sociology
Explanation for what? Behavior generally? In that case, the Big 5 is less of the predictor and more the criterion. The Big 5 is not a theory, it's a taxonomy that emerged from trait theory. It describes, it clusters, it predicts, but in and of itself it doesn't explain.
> ... seems like a lame excuse to hire from your ingroup and excluding your outgroup.
When it comes to hiring in the United States this is literally the opposite of the biggest use-case for personality testing for the past 50 years. But that's the only domain I can speak confidently on, and that doesn't include class or SES as a subgroup.
> there is no justification for the operationally defined terms
This is subjective, and I do not agree. If your critique of The Big 5 is actually a critique of trait theory more generally, I'm there for that. But a taxonomy for observable behaviors that shows reliability as well as content, convergent, and predictive validity across many populations and contexts seems justified to me barring a superior option.
The Big 5 is not and never would be a grand theory of human behavior, but it does describe actual behavior in a way that is interpretable and connected to the world we actually inhabit.
I don’t know how people interpret results from personality tests which gives them a criterion for what constitutes a good hire. However I have a strong feeling there is no sound science behind whichever criteria recruiters are using. And that risks placing arbitrarily high weights on whichever traits correlate with your in-group. This, however, is a falsifiable claim, and if anyone has ever done research which shows that personality tests actually reduces bias (as opposed to enhances it) then I’m open to be proven wrong. I do also question the efficacy of using personality tests as a tool to scope for good hires. How do companies actually measure that? There are so many biases that comes to mind that could make a company overvalue the efficacy of these tests.
My critique applies for all theories of personality. I don’t see personality traits as a useful categorization to predict behavior. By far the most research I see in personality psychology is about correlation with other terms inside a very narrow scope (this also applies other sub-fields of psychometrics; including positive psychology). The behavior that personality tests predicts does not further our understanding of the human mind. A theory of behavior that fails to do that is a poor theory at best.
But I want to go further, I don’t claim that personality psychology is just poor science but pseudo-science.
>> there is no justification for the operationally defined terms
The personality traits in the big-5 are operationally defined. That is they are defined in terms of what the tools are designed to detect. This is useful inside your models (as evidence by the success of big-5) but this does not tell us anything outside of our model. Now if you go to the real world and find evidence that these terms exist outside of your model, then I would change my mind. That would be a pretty good grounds for a theory which describes something that your model predicts accurately. If you don’t then you have at most a useful construct that you can use in other theories (think atom before they proved it’s existence). IF you can’t even use your constructs outside of your scope, then there is not much value in it outside of a narrow scope and you are most likely doing pseudo-science.
My critique actually extends to all personality traits. Personality traits (if they exist) can at best describe a proportion of the variability within a narrow scope. Outside of that narrow scope it is actually just better to describe a person as calm and courteous as opposed to speculate where they stand in the agreeableness axis in the Big-5 personality trait. And this is what I mean when I say “lack of justification”. ‘Agreeableness’ has been operationally defined within a certain model. When you use it elsewhere you need to justify doing so. And there should probably be a scientific consensus about whether the justification is good enough. If not you are most likely doing pseudo-science
Personally my biggest gripe personally is that it is represented as a model of total personality, but that's definitely not true. It's just just representing a larger "personality space" than most other constructs. At least the outcome isn't placing one into a discrete category.