Big Five Personality Test

What this actually measures

The five-factor model is the only description of personality in wide use that was not invented by anyone. It was found — repeatedly, by different researchers, on different continents, using different languages — by taking every word a language has for describing people and asking which ones move together. The same five clusters keep coming out, and they have kept coming out since the 1980s.

That history is the entire reason this test is here rather than a more entertaining one. The five factors predict things you would want a personality measure to predict: job performance, relationship stability, health outcomes, how long people stay in careers. They are moderately heritable, they are stable enough to be worth measuring, and they drift with age in a direction that is consistent across cultures — most people become somewhat more conscientious and less volatile as they get older.

Where the items come from

The 100 statements here follow the naming and structure of the IPIP — the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain bank of items built specifically so that researchers would not have to license commercial instruments. Twenty statements per factor, ten of them reverse-keyed so that agreeing with everything produces a meaningless result rather than a flattering one.

The free run takes the first five statements of every factor, which is why it gives you a real reading on all five rather than a precise reading on two. The full run uses all twenty.

What it cannot tell you

Your score is a comparison, not a measurement of a quantity. “High openness” means high relative to the people who have answered these questions — it is a position on a distribution, not an amount of a substance.

It is also a self-report, which means it measures how you see yourself on the day you answered. That correlates well with how other people see you, and not perfectly. If a result surprises you, the useful question is not whether the test is wrong but whether the gap between your self-description and other people’s description of you is itself informative.

And it does not diagnose anything. The five factors are dimensions of ordinary variation. A very high score on emotional volatility is a description of temperament, not a clinical finding — though if that temperament is causing you distress, that is worth discussing with someone qualified, entirely separately from anything a questionnaire says.