A person’s personality includes a thorough look at one’s lifestyle, characteristics, emotions, hobbies, appearance. Scientists from Northwestern University claim that the top five best personality traits are integrity, openness, neuroticism, consciousness, and extraversion. I surveyed a group of students to see their thoughts on the best personality traits, to see how the top five traits of scientists correlate with students’ top five.

According to the survey, 32% of the students claim to fully agree with the scientist’s top five traits, however, 68% of the students did not. Some traits that were listed instead of the top five were honesty, kindness, comfort, agreeableness, cleanliness, compassion, humility, responsibility, fairness, confidence, humor, and loyalty. I further questioned four students, Miabella Smith, Claire Bucher, AJ Neher, and Angelo Misnik. Miabella Smith stated that “honesty is key when you want to build a strong relationship with someone. How can you like someone when they continuously lie and show no honesty?” Although honesty was not stated to be a top-five trait, one can agree personally that this trait is very important and respectable. Angelo Misnik also stated humor a top trait, as it is “nice to be able to enjoy a good laugh with someone rather than be serious all of the time”. While speaking to AJ Neher he stated that cleanliness is one of his personal top five traits. When asked to further explain Neher stated that “If someone is clean, it makes you want to take them seriously, cleanliness gives off the vibe that you’re put together and that’s important to me”. While conducting my last interview with Claire Bucher, she gave the trait of loyalty. Bucher stated, “It is comforting to know when someone is loyal to you, that you won’t go behind their backs”. After conducting these four interviews, I was able to further understand students’ perspectives on the top five personality traits vs Northwestern University students’ perspectives.

Although the two group’s opinions differ around the top five personality traits, there are some commonalities. The same themes are given overall. Personality is important in all aspects of life. From work to school, to relationships, your personality affects you more than you know. Digging deeper into your personality with personality tests can help further expand your knowledge of what to help improve upon. www.16personalitiestest.com gives a great, short test that can show you your own personality and top traits. According to the website, conscientiousness is the most common trait amongst test takers. However, that does not mean that conscientiousness is the most important trait of all.

Based on the surveys and research that has been conducted, the top personality traits clearly vary from person to person. One’s personality traits can ultimately set up who they are as a person, and how others perceive them. The top five personality traits from Northwestern University scientists might not agree with the students of Pennridge, but that is okay! As Albert Einstein once said, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”. It is more important to be valued with a great personality than riches.