Big Five Personality Test

1. Read a statement. For example, "I am the life of the party."
2. Choose how well it describes you, from "Very inaccurate" to "Very accurate". Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you would like to be.
3. Get your profile. Each trait comes from 10 statements; some are reversed, so agreeing with "I keep in the background" counts towards lower extraversion.

There are 50 statements and nothing is timed. Your answers are scored on our server and saved to build comparisons; our privacy policy says what is kept.

• Openness (in this item set: intellect and imagination): enjoying ideas, abstract thinking and imagination.
• Conscientiousness: being organized, careful and reliable, and following through.
• Extraversion: being outgoing, talkative and energized by company.
• Agreeableness: being warm, caring and considerate of others.
• Emotional stability: staying calm and even-tempered. Its opposite end, neuroticism, means feeling stress, worry and mood changes more strongly.

No end of a trait is better than the other: each fits some situations and goals better than others. A score of 70 means your answers sat 70% of the way from the lowest to the highest possible answers. It is not a percentile and not "70% extraverted".

We don't show percentiles yet. No large, published comparison data exists for this exact set of 50 statements, and the people who run the item pool advise against borrowing numbers from other questionnaires [7]. Once enough people have taken the test here, we can compare your answers with theirs.

• The five keep turning up. When researchers analyse the words people use to describe each other, five broad groups appear again and again, in many languages [1] [4].
• Traits relate to life outcomes, modestly. In a large check of 78 earlier findings, most links between traits and outcomes such as health, relationships and work held up in new samples, but were usually smaller than first reported [5].
• Personality changes slowly. Across 92 studies, people became more conscientious, agreeable and emotionally stable from young adulthood into middle age [3].
• Both genes and life play a part. In a review of twin and family studies, about 40% of the differences between people's traits were linked to genes [6].

This is a self-report: it shows how you see yourself today. Mood, how you read a statement and how you compare yourself with others all affect the answers, so taking it again can shift each trait a little. It is not a clinical or hiring test, and it says nothing about mental health. Compare with friends for fun, and keep in mind that two people's scores only mean something if both answered honestly.