The Five Factor Model of personality, or Big 5, is the dominant empirical model of human personality (Briggs, 1992; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1990). Since the Big 5 took this place of prominance about three decades prior to this writing, studies of personality under the Big 5 framework have proliferated. During this time the structure of the Big 5 model has remained remarkably robust: at the facet level, the Big 5 is an effective taxonomy for organizing most stand-alone traits (Bainbridge et al., 2022).
Dominance is a personality trait that captures how much an individual strives to be in high status positions within social hierarchies (Mast & Hall, 2017), though trait dominance is distinct from the social rank one occupies. Dominant individuals tend to be assertive, confident, forceful, and self-assured (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009); trait dominance thus shares considerable conceptual and empirical space with traits like assertiveness, self-confidence, social boldness, social potency, and many others (Altschul & Moore, 2023). At its narrowest, dominance can be tapped by a construct like the assertiveness facet of the NEO (Costa & McCrae, 1995), which is one of 6 facets of the extraversion dimension. At its broadest, dominance can be measured through a construct like fearless-dominance, which originates with the psychopathic personality inventory and incorporates aspects of extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and more (Miller & Lynam, 2012; Ross et al., 2009).
If one examines the personality structures of our closest evolutionary relatives, the African apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas), each representative this clade exhibits a dominance personality domain that captures more variance than other domains (Eckardt et al., 2015; King & Figueredo, 1997; Weiss et al., 2015). The other domains generally represent the rest of the Big 5, as well; extraversion must be reconceived without dominance/assertiveness, however.
Based on the evidence from animal personality research, as well as ecology (Drews, 1993; Rowell, 1974), dominance appears to be a trait of central importance to most great apes. However, in humans, dominance simply did not (and does not) “pop out” at the top level during the development of top-level human personality structures. Dominance is usually treated as a facet of extraversion, and receives much less attention than the Big 5. When domimance is distinctly measured, it is attended to along with as many as 29 other facets, which are all treated as manifesting at the same level, and are implicitly considered to be of equal importance.
Because of dominance’s powerful importance to our closest evolutionary relatives, and the strong probability that it played a crucial role among our evolutionary ancestors, it is worth considering dominance in humans alongside the traditional Big 5. An important first step in understanding dominance in this way is to ask how closely dominance correlates with the Big 5, which themselves often correlate highly (Bainbridge et al., 2022).