Icosa vs Big Five (OCEAN)
The Big Five captures 87% of Icosa's structural information across capacities and some domains, but loses coherence depth, trap patterns, and gateway dynamics entirely — the highest of any framework in this comparison family.
Overview
The Big Five, also known as the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or OCEAN model, emerged from the lexical hypothesis that the most important personality differences would be encoded in natural language. Through independent factor analyses in the 1950s–1980s by Tupes, Christal, Goldberg, and McCrae and Costa, five robust factors emerged: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. It remains the dominant framework in academic personality psychology.
Icosa was developed independently of the Big Five, but structural overlap is substantial enough that cross-system translation is clinically useful. The Big Five captures the surface expression of Icosa’s capacity states well — Open maps to O, Extraversion maps to Move, Conscientiousness to Focus and Move, Agreeableness to Bond plus Relational domain — but stops short of Icosa’s dynamic, state-based architecture.
What This Framework Captures
The Big Five captures approximately 87% of Icosa’s structural information when capacity states and broad domain emphases are the target. Specific coverage weights:
- Capacities: 90% — The five OCEAN factors map well onto Icosa’s four capacities (Open, Move, Focus, Bond). Structural correlations: O→Open (r=0.72), C→Focus+Move (r=0.68), E→Move (r=0.75), A→Bond+Relational (r=0.70).
- Domains: 70% — Big Five domain mapping is partial. Openness captures the Spiritual and Mental domain signature, Agreeableness maps to the Relational domain, but Physical domain and Spiritual depth are underspecified.
- Coherence: 60% — Low Neuroticism correlates with high coherence, but Big Five does not model coherence as an integrative dynamic property. It measures traits, not integration states.
- Traps: 20% — Some trap patterns co-vary with extreme trait scores (e.g., high Neuroticism + low Open predicts withdrawal trap risk), but this is inferential rather than direct.
- Gateways: 10% — Gateway dynamics are not represented in Big Five theory or measurement.
What This Framework Misses
While the Big Five captures 87% of Icosa’s capacity-level structure, it misses the deeper architectural layers. When the full 20-center model (including coherence, traps, gateways, and center dynamics) is the reference, approximately 75% of that total information space is lost. Key blind spots:
Center oscillations. Big Five measures stable trait levels. Icosa measures dynamic state oscillations across 20 centers. A person who is chronically high-E (Big Five) may have high Move capacity but with significant center instability — something Big Five cannot detect.
Trap patterns. Big Five does not model pathological attractor states. High Neuroticism is a risk indicator, not a trap diagnosis. A person in the Overwhelm trap (high Openness + collapsed Focus) would show elevated N and O scores but the trap’s structural signature — the specific oscillation pattern, the gateway blockage — is invisible to Big Five.
Icosa Emotional Domain vs. Neuroticism. This is the most clinically significant divergence. A person with high coherence and centered Emotional domain maps to neither high nor low Neuroticism consistently. Icosa’s Emotional domain measures the centrality of emotional life to a person’s orientation — it is not a distress indicator. High emotional centrality can be a strength (emotionally attuned therapist, artistic creative). Big Five N conflates distress with emotional salience.
Spiritual domain depth. Big Five lacks any construct for meaning, transcendence, or spiritual orientation. Icosa’s Spiritual domain contributes substantively to coherence scores and to certain trap/gateway patterns.
Gateway dynamics. The relational interfaces between Icosa’s structural regions (gateways) have no Big Five analog.
Confidence Methodology
Base confidence: 0.87. This represents the expected structural overlap when translating from a known Big Five profile to an Icosa profile, before accounting for measurement error in either instrument.
Per-type confidence range: 0.78–0.88. Individual OCEAN facet types vary:
- High/Low Openness: 0.85–0.88 (strongest mapping, direct structural correspondence)
- High/Low Extraversion: 0.84–0.88 (Move capacity is the clearest single-factor correlation)
- High/Low Conscientiousness: 0.85–0.87
- High/Low Agreeableness: 0.83–0.85
- High/Low Neuroticism: 0.78–0.84 (weakest mapping due to Emotional domain divergence)
Formula. Icosa confidence scores are computed as:
type_confidence = base_confidence × coverage_weighted_overlap × (1 - information_loss_penalty)
where information_loss_penalty reflects the proportion of Icosa’s state space that the external type leaves underspecified.
PCA note. A principal components analysis of Icosa’s 20-center profile space requires 19 of 20 components to reconstruct 95% of variance (R²=.958). The Big Five’s 5-factor solution captures the first 3–4 components well but collapses the remaining 15–16 into residual noise. This is the geometric basis for the 75% information loss figure.
Convergent validity. Icosa’s convergent validity study (N=10,169) found rₛ=0.01 for domain-to-domain semantic alignment — meaning Icosa’s domain structure (Emotional, Mental, etc.) shares essentially no surface overlap with Big Five factor labels. Separately, Icosa’s coherence metric correlates at r=0.46 with external framework composites, sharing 22% of variance while remaining 78% structurally independent. Together these confirm that Icosa measures genuinely different properties than the Big Five aggregate.
Coverage Matrix
| Icosa Dimension | Big Five Coverage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Open capacity | 90% | Big Five O direct analog |
| Move capacity | 85% | Big Five E (Extraversion) |
| Focus capacity | 85% | Big Five C (Conscientiousness) |
| Bond capacity | 80% | Big Five A (Agreeableness) |
| Physical domain | 30% | Big Five E physical activity facets |
| Emotional domain | 50% | Big Five N (inverted, partial) |
| Mental domain | 65% | Big Five O facets |
| Relational domain | 70% | Big Five A partial |
| Spiritual domain | 15% | Not directly represented |
| Coherence | 60% | Low N correlate only |
| Traps | 20% | Extreme scores only |
| Gateways | 10% | Not represented |
| Center stability | 5% | Big Five does not model dynamics |
Type-by-Type Mapping
| Big Five Type | Primary Icosa Mapping | Confidence | Coherence Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| High Openness | O+ over (r=0.72), S+M+ domains | 0.88 | 45–85 |
| Low Openness | O+ under, P+ domain | 0.85 | 50–80 |
| High Conscientiousness | F+ over, V+ moderate, M+ domain | 0.87 | 55–90 |
| Low Conscientiousness | F+ under, V+ reduced | 0.85 | 35–70 |
| High Extraversion | V+ over (r=0.75), R+ domain | 0.88 | 50–85 |
| Low Extraversion | V+ under, O+ centered | 0.84 | 45–80 |
| High Agreeableness | B+ over (r=0.70), R+ domain | 0.85 | 50–85 |
| Low Agreeableness | B+ under, V+ modest | 0.83 | 40–75 |
| High Neuroticism | O+ over (E domain), F+ under, low coherence | 0.78 | 25–55 |
| Low Neuroticism | Centered capacities, E+ centered, high coherence | 0.84 | 60–90 |
Capacity key: O=Open, V=Move, F=Focus, B=Bond. Domain key: P=Physical, E=Emotional, M=Mental, R=Relational, S=Spiritual.
Bidirectional Translation
Big Five → Icosa uses the standard structural mapping with a 30% reverse discount applied to confidence scores. This reflects the information asymmetry: Icosa contains more structural information than Big Five, so translating from Big Five to Icosa necessarily involves inference and imputation.
A Big Five profile with high E, moderate O, moderate C, moderate A, low N would translate to an Icosa starting point of: V+ elevated, O+ moderate, F+ moderate, B+ moderate, centered Emotional domain, coherence expectation 60–85. The remaining Icosa structure (Spiritual domain depth, center oscillations, trap risk, gateway states) would be marked as unresolved.
Icosa → Big Five is a lossy projection. A full Icosa profile projects onto 5 Big Five dimensions but discards 15 dimensions of state information.
Known Gaps
The Big Five does not include blend types or interaction effects between dimensions that map onto Icosa’s structural regions. Combinations such as high O + low C (which in Icosa predicts specific trap risk) are interpretable in Big Five only as independent trait addends, not as a structurally meaningful configuration.
Research Basis
- McCrae & Costa (1987). Validation of the five-factor model across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 81–90.
- Goldberg (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48(1), 26–34.
- John, Naumann & Soto (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy. Handbook of Personality (3rd ed.).
- Icosa Validation Study (2026). Structural comparison analysis: OCEAN-to-Icosa PCA comparison. Internal N=10,169. rₛ=0.01 (domain-to-domain semantic alignment). Coherence r=0.46 (22% shared variance). 19/20 PCA components required for 95% Icosa variance reconstruction (R²=.958).
Interactive Explorer
Select a Big Five (OCEAN) type below to see which Icosa centers it maps to. Switch between views to explore capacity targets, domain emphasis, and structural blind spots.
High Agreeableness
Cooperative, trusting, helpful, compassionate, empathetic
- Center oscillations (Big Five doesn't capture instability)
- Trap patterns (Big Five doesn't model pathology)
- Spiritual domain depth (not directly measured)
- Gateway dynamics (not captured)
See how your profile translates
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