In Profiling Your Characters, part 1 I briefly explained the Five-Factor Personality Model as described in the book “Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality” by Samuel Barondes. Now I want to show how it can be applied to characters in our stories.

Profiling a Personality

An informal assessment of someone’s personality (yourself or someone else) can be done simply by considering the traits listed in my previous post and rating each on a low-medium-high scale. But profiling tools provide a more accurate assessment by asking a series of questions that have been precisely worded, organized and statistically tested to avoid various forms of bias (e.g. some people tend to answer yes too easily, so essentially the same question is typically asked twice with the opposite sense to detect this). Continue reading →