Big Five Personality Test
The Big Five is the only personality model with a real research base behind it — it is what actually shows up when you factor-analyze how people describe themselves, across languages and across decades. This runs the public-domain IPIP-NEO item pool in three lengths and scores it against published norms for your age and sex. Nothing you answer leaves your browser.
Choose a length
Who to compare you against
A raw score means nothing on its own — percentiles come from comparing you to a reference group, and personality scores differ by age and sex. Both are optional; leave them alone and you’ll be scored against everyone.
Used only to pick a norm table in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and you can change it on the results page.
Not a diagnosis. This is a normal-range personality questionnaire, not a clinical or psychiatric instrument, and it says nothing about mental illness, intelligence, or whether you should be hired. Self-report measures also assume you’re answering honestly and reflectively — answer how you actually are, not how you’d like to be.
What the five traits are
Openness to Experience — imagination, aesthetics, appetite for the unfamiliar. You can enjoy novelty without needing it. You'll follow an unfamiliar idea when there's something in it for you, but you don't chase strangeness for its own sake, and practical considerations still get a vote.
Conscientiousness — planning, persistence, self-discipline, impulse control. You're organized when it counts and relaxed when it doesn't. You can push through work you don't enjoy, though not endlessly, and you keep enough structure to function without being ruled by it.
Extraversion — sociability, assertiveness, energy, positive emotion. You move between company and solitude without much friction. You can hold a room when you want to and you're just as content out of one, so neither setting takes much out of you.
Agreeableness — trust, cooperation, consideration for others. You're cooperative but not a pushover. You extend good faith and expect it back, and you'll hold a line when something matters rather than smoothing it over automatically.
Neuroticism — sensitivity to stress and negative emotion. You feel stress like most people do — it lands, and it passes. Bad days get to you without taking over, and you generally recover on a normal timescale.
Each of the five splits into six narrower facets — thirty in all — and two people with the same domain score can look completely different once you read the facets underneath it.
Method, sources and the fine print
The items. Every statement here comes from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain bank of personality items maintained by the Oregon Research Institute. The 300-item form is Goldberg’s IPIP-NEO-300, built as a public-domain analogue of Costa & McCrae’s NEO PI-R and covering the same five domains and thirty facets. The 120-item form is John A. Johnson’s IPIP-NEO-120, a shortened version validated on a sample of over 300,000 people. The 30-item form is not a published instrument: it takes one item from each of the thirty facets in the 120, chosen so that half the items are reverse-worded, and estimates each facet from that single item. Treat its numbers as a sketch.
The scoring. Items are answered 1–5, reverse-keyed items are flipped (6 minus your answer), facet scores are the sum of their items, and domain scores are the sum of their six facets. Those raw sums are converted to T-scores — mean 50, standard deviation 10 — against Johnson’s published norm tables, which are broken out by sex and age band. Percentiles come from the normal distribution of those T-scores. The 30-item form is scaled onto the 120-item metric before the same norms are applied, which is why its percentiles are labelled as estimates.
The error bars. No questionnaire measures anything exactly. The whisker under each meter is a 68% confidence interval — roughly one standard error of measurement — computed from the reliability of each form: about α = .92 per domain for the 300-item version, about .85 for the 120, and the Spearman–Brown projection of that down to a quarter of the length (about .59) for the 30. If two people’s bands overlap, the difference between them isn’t worth talking about.
What it can’t do. Self-report can be gamed, deliberately or not; a bad week can move Neuroticism; and norms drawn largely from English-speaking internet volunteers are not a perfect stand-in for humanity. The Big Five is descriptive, not explanatory — it tells you where you sit relative to other people, not why, and it is not a type system. There are no categories here, no letters, and no “you are an X” — those belong to instruments with much weaker evidence behind them.
Privacy. Everything runs in your browser. Answers are kept in this device’s local storage so you can close the tab mid-test. They are never written to a server: the only way a result leaves the device is inside a share link you copy and send yourself, and even then it lives in the link rather than in a database.
- Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7–28.
- Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89.
- Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) professional manual.
- Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2017). The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 117–143.