One way to study personality is to simply ask people to describe themselves. You give them phrases, adjectives, or questions, and when you analyze the patterns in their answers, the same five broad dimensions appear. Words like talkative, gregarious, and outgoing cluster together under extroversion. Researchers also use what are called informant-reporting methods. Instead of asking you to describe yourself, they ask the people who know you—your friends, family, teachers, coworkers, or romantic partners—to describe you. What’s striking is how similar the two sets of reports tend to be. Self-descriptions generally line up with how others see you. People are, for the most part, fairly accurate judges of their own personality, or at least their assessments track closely with how the people around them evaluate them.

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