Personal Growth
The Sentence You Say About Yourself May Be Years Out of Date
Lines like "not a morning person" are often expired facts, not lies. What research says about how adults change, and a two-word edit to try.
🧩 Quiz
The Big Five personality test
Fifty statements, about eight minutes: a public-domain version of the questionnaire personality researchers use, scored the way it is published.
50 questions about 8 min Research questionnaire
Fifty short statements. Answer for the way you are now, not the way you would like to be.
Your individual answers stay in your browser; with your consent, the site only counts which result comes up.
What this is
The fifty statements come from the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain collection of personality questions run by the Oregon Research Institute. This set is its version of the five broad traits researchers call the Big Five, ten statements per trait. The only edit is the “I” at the start of each statement; the original items leave it out. Scoring follows the published key: each answer counts from one to five, reversed for the statements that point the other way, and the ten answers of a trait are added up.
The trait the key calls “intellect or imagination” appears here as imagination, and “emotional stability” is the opposite end of what is often called neuroticism.
What it can tell you
Big Five scores are linked to real outcomes, from relationships to work, and those links mostly hold up. A preregistered project that tried to replicate 78 published trait-outcome links, with a median of about 1,500 people per test, confirmed 87 percent of them in the expected direction, although the effects were typically about three quarters as strong as first reported.
What it cannot tell you
The low, middle and high bands on this page are ours. The questionnaire has no official cut-offs, and we do not compare your score with a population sample, so read the bars as “where you sit on this scale”, not as a ranking against other people. Scores describe tendencies, not destinies, and they move over a lifetime. Nothing here is a clinical assessment. Your individual answers stay in your browser; with your consent, the site only counts which result comes up.
Sources
- International Personality Item Pool. Oregon Research Institute
- Big-Five Factor Markers: 50-item IPIP scoring key. International Personality Item Pool
- How replicable are links between personality traits and consequential life outcomes? The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project. Psychological Science, 2019
Read the research behind it
Relationships
Your Advice Was Good. Why Is Your Partner Annoyed?
Why a partner bristles at well-meant advice, what couples research says about mismatched support, and the one question to ask before you answer.
More quizzes
All quizzes → Guess how the average American day really looks Sleep, TV, chores, friends, the gym: ten guesses about how people spend an average day, each checked against the latest US government time-use survey. Habits and willpower: myth or fact? The 21-day rule, willpower as a battery, the magic of a made bed: ten popular claims about habits and self-control, each checked against the research. Morning lark or night owl? The chronotype quiz Four sleep times, two minutes. Works out your chronotype and your weekly social jetlag with the method sleep researchers use, not a personality guess.