The Big Five Personality Traits in Everyday Life

After reading about the Big Five, I was able to start recognizing a lot of those traits in people around me, such as friends, family, and even people that I saw on television in shows and in movies. I liked how the traits can lead to patterns, such as when assessing the U.S. past Presidents. Those that were open to experience went along with historical greatness, while those that were agreeable went against historical greatness. Applying more generally, conscientiousness is usually positively correlated with things like physical health and life span. Furthermore, I found it interesting during the activity during discussion that used the Berkeley Personality Profile from the beginning of the year to separate us into groups to pick vacations. What I found interesting was that people usually picked places that were known to fit with their "profiles." Something that I found kind of surprising was that our class went 100% for being able to guess which group we fell into. To me, this means that people are also cognizant and aware of their own style and other people that are similar to their own style. After I realized this I started thinking about my close friends and also realized that many of us have very similar personality profiles that would also fit with similar Big Five personality traits. At the end of the day, I think it is important that although people may fit a certain personality "profile" it is not a know-all-be-all way to tell what people will be like. I think this is evident in the profession of criminal profiling, where law enforcement attempts to put together a general profile of what a criminal's personality and tendencies could be. I think this is interesting because on some occasions those without any training, such as chemists and students, did better than those who had training, such as police and detectives.
http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/a/bigfive.htm