Enneagram vs Big Five: What Each One Measures, and What the Evidence Supports

At a glance

Where each one came from

The Enneagram: a teaching tradition

The nine-pointed symbol was introduced to Western audiences by the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in the early twentieth century, but he did not use it to describe personality types. Oscar Ichazo attached nine personality “fixations” to the points and taught the system in Arica, Chile, around 1970. The psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo learned the system from Ichazo and connected the types to psychiatric descriptions of character in workshops in California in the early 1970s.

Helen Palmer’s The Enneagram (1988) and the work of Don Riso and Russ Hudson, who built the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI), made it widely known. The nine types were described first; questionnaires came later.

The Big Five: a measurement project

The Big Five started from the idea that important differences between people get encoded in language. Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert (1936) listed thousands of English trait words. Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal (1961) found five recurring factors in rating data, Lewis Goldberg (1990) confirmed the structure, and Paul Costa and Robert McCrae built the NEO questionnaires around it. The five factors were found in the data, not chosen in advance.

What each one measures

The two systems answer different questions. The Big Five asks how anxious, organized, outgoing, trusting or curious you are compared with other adults. The Enneagram asks what you are trying to get or avoid when you act that way. Two people can both score high in Conscientiousness, one because they fear being wrong (a classic Type 1 description) and one because they want to be seen as successful (Type 3).

The table shows the Big Five pattern each type description implies. Studies that gave people both an Enneagram questionnaire and a Big Five questionnaire, including Rebecca Newgent and colleagues’ 2004 study of the RHETI, have found several of these links in the expected direction. Treat them as tendencies.

The overlap is partial. Some of each type is captured by the Big Five, and some, especially the motivational story, is not. Whether that remaining part is real signal or good storytelling is the question the research has not settled.

What the research says

The Enneagram’s record

Early work includes Jerome Wagner and Ronald Walker’s 1983 reliability and validity study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Newgent and colleagues (2004) found that reliability of the RHETI type scales varied considerably from type to type. Joshua Hook and colleagues’ 2021 systematic review pulled the literature together and concluded that support was mixed: some studies backed the Enneagram’s reliability and validity, others did not, and few tested whether type predicts anything that matters.

There is also no single standard instrument. The RHETI, Jerome Wagner’s WEPSS and the iEQ9 were each built separately, and published comparisons between them are scarce, so “your type” partly depends on which questionnaire you took.

The Big Five’s record

Big Five scores hold steady over weeks, and people’s rank order on each trait grows more stable with age (Brent Roberts and Wendy DelVecchio, 2000). Brent Roberts and colleagues (2007) found the traits predicted mortality, divorce and career attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and cognitive ability. Christopher Soto (2019) retested 78 published trait-outcome links in new samples and replicated 87% of them. For more detail, see how accurate personality tests are.

Where the Enneagram earns its place

The Enneagram gives people language for motive, which the Big Five does not try to provide. “I take on too much because I need to be needed” is a sentence people act on. Each type also has a described direction under stress and of growth, a ready-made agenda for reflection or coaching.

Used as a set of questions about why you do what you do, it can help even without strong psychometric support. The trouble starts when a type is treated as a measurement or used to make decisions about other people.

Where the Big Five is the better tool

• Decisions. Choosing a career, a partner pattern to work on, or a habit to change needs scores that hold still on retest.
• Emotional stability. Neuroticism is measured directly. If yours is high, see what helps with high Neuroticism.
• Tracking change. A score that moves from 72 to 64 over a year tells you something. A type that stays “6” does not.

How to use both

1. Take a Big Five test and note your highest and lowest traits.
2. Take an Enneagram test and look at your top three type scores, not only the winner.
3. Check each candidate type against the table above. A Type 7 result with Extraversion at 25 deserves a second look at your other top types.
4. For the type that fits best, write down one situation from the last month where its core motivation explains what you did better than anything else. If you cannot find one, hold the type loosely.

Coaches who use the Enneagram with clients can pair it with Big Five scores in the same way; the guide for coaches covers debriefs, and the Coach Pack covers five clients’ full reports for $99.

How Depth Profile handles both

The free Personality Core scores the Big Five from 48 IPIP-style items, 9 or 10 per trait, on a 0 to 100 scale. The separate Enneagram assessment has 45 statements, five per type, each rated from 1 to 5. Your core type is your highest-scoring type, your wing is the higher-scoring of its two neighbors on the circle, and your tritype takes the top type from each of the three centers (gut, heart and head).

Both results are free. The optional Full Depth Report ($19) reads them together with any other assessments you have taken, so a mismatch between your type and your traits gets discussed instead of ignored. If you prefer type language in general, the 16Personalities alternatives guide covers the other popular system.