 The Big Five model is a taxonomy of personality traits. But before jumping into the details, something should be said, even if too briefly, about the relationship between personality traits and character traits. Strikingly, for many decades in the twentieth century, psychologists rarely invoked the language of “character traits,” although in recent years this has been changing. The historical story is complex and beyond the scope of this article, but one factor responsible for this aversion was the rise of positivism and its dismal of value-laden concepts from scientific investigation, with “character” begin regarded as one such concept. Another factor was the rise of situationism in social psychology and its related skepticism about the empirical adequacy of traditional character traits (for more see Peterson and Seligman 2004: 55-9). 