eHarmony Blog.com

The five report categories of the Premium Personality Profile and the regular Personality Profile, i.e.,

• Agreeableness
• Openness (Curious or Contented)
• Emotional Stability (Steady or Responsive)
• Conscientiousness (Focused or Flexible)
• Extraversion (Outgoing or Reserved)

are not random factors conjured by Galen Buckwalter and his eHarmony scientists. They actually form a clinical personality model invented in 1933 by Louis Leon Thurstone, one of the pioneers of psychometry.

They are also referred to as the “Five Factor Model” (FFM). Each factor consists of a cluster of more specific traits that correlate together. For example, extraversion includes such related qualities as sociability, excitement seeking, impulsiveness, and positive emotions. The five factors, more precisely, are as follows:

1. Agreeableness – a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
2. Emotional Stability / Neuroticism – a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.
3. Openness to Experiences – appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.
4. Conscientiousness – a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
5. Extraversion – energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.

(quick definition from Wikipedia)

So the touted $40 Personality Profile is really only a disguised FFM Report

Before today I really thought eHarmony brilliantly invented a five-aspect model of the human personality. I thought it was “state-of-the-art psychological research.” 1933? It’s not even modern!

The 250-item questionnaire measures a lot of things, like spirituality, desire to raise a family, smoking habits, and interest in Horseback Riding, that have nothing to do with the Five Factors. I wrote last year how betrayed I felt that the eHarmony computers didn’t tell me everything it measured. It’s as if a reporter interviewed a traveller about a life-changing trip to Tibet but then all the reporter eventually writes about was how lax airport security is. The airport piece was accurate and was very well written, so can the traveller complain?

We all know that the Personality Profile is just a tiny byproduct of the information gathering eHarmony did.

Want a second opinion? Or a third? Fourth, fifth?

After answering an additional 15 questions and a payment of $10-$20, eHarmony elaborates with a “Premium Personality Profile”, a fifteen (web)page FFM report.

For those interested, here are several online questionnaires that measure someone on these Five Factors (Agreeableness, Openness, Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness and Extraversion). All are free. On most of them, you don’t even have to give out information like your name, birthday or email address and you don’t have to look at banner ads. How’s that as a better alternative?

• The IPIP-NEO – International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R
• Tom Buchanan’s Five Factor Personality Test
• OutOfService’s Big 5 Personality Test
• In OKCupid: The Big Four Test and The Big 4 Personality (Beta) Test
• Signal Patterns – Discover the Real Me

If you want more, the above Wikipedia resource lists various identifiable traits for each factor (e.g., “I take time out for others.”) –you can practically write your own test and test yourself.

(Thank you to Justin whose blog post lead me to investigate this. eHarmony never tells us any of this, and nobody seemed to have noticed this before.)