Hello, I’m Wang Fang. Greetings to you at this very moment.

We have repeatedly said that the Big Five is currently recognized in psychology as the best model for describing personality. But why? Where does its scientific validity lie? Why can today’s academic community endorse it as a relatively strong model? To answer, we need to examine how the Big Five arose, involving a hypothesis called the lexical hypothesis of personality traits and a statistical method called factor analysis.

Let us first examine the methodological foundation of the Big Five:the lexical hypothesis. This is a bottom-up hypothesis. It did not emerge from a particular theory but from an analysis of vocabulary.

Words, language, and writing have extraordinary significance for human beings. In Wittgenstein’s formulation, we all live beneath a great net woven from words. We do not control words; words control us, from thought to behavior. Language and writing form a symbolic system that influences thought and worldview. You cannot imagine an object you cannot describe in language. If Chinese has no suitable word for something, that thing may not exist in your world; the language you use therefore defines the boundary of the world you can know. Learning a foreign language can expand that boundary. Poverty is not the only thing that limits imagination; language does too.

The language we use also seems connected with personality. People often say that different people speak differently; the reverse may also be true: speaking differently may make us different people. Many people, for example, feel thatwhen they switch from one language to another, their personality seems to change as well.Speaking the soft Wu dialect may make someone sound gentle, while switching to a northeastern Chinese dialect can instantly make the whole person seem streetwise. Cultural psychologists have also found thatlanguage activates its corresponding culture. People fluent in both English and Japanese, for example, behave more individualistically when asked to think and express themselves in English, and more collectivistically when using Japanese (e.g., Oyserman & Lee, 2018).