Big Five test: your profile on five dimensions in about three minutes

The five dimensions

Most personality research works with the Big Five model. It describes people on five scales that stand apart from each other, without sorting anyone into a group:

• Extraversion: how much energy you get from being around other people and from a busy setting.
• Agreeableness: how much you focus on the feelings and interests of other people.
• Conscientiousness: how much you care about order, planning and finishing things.
• Emotional stability: how strongly tension and moods affect you.
• Openness: how much you are drawn to ideas, imagination and new thoughts.

None of the five scales has a good end. High and low extraversion describe two ways of dealing with company, and the same goes for the other four.

Many descriptions call the fourth dimension neuroticism, with the scale turned around. We use the name emotional stability, as the questionnaire our statements come from does.

Where the statements come from

The statements come from the International Personality Item Pool, IPIP for short: a public domain collection of questionnaires that anyone may use and translate. We use the fifty statements of the IPIP-50, the set Lewis Goldberg put together for the five factors, ten per dimension, in their original English wording. The one change is that each of them starts with "I", so it reads as a full sentence on its own card. For every statement we keep track of the original item it comes from.

Why two statements side by side

The IPIP-50 was written as a list of statements you agree or disagree with. We put two statements from different dimensions next to each other, and you pick one. Two things are fixed. A pair always consists of two statements that are about equally pleasant to say about yourself, so there is no obvious right answer between them. And each dimension appears in 16 choices, so they all count equally.

As a result, your profile is a ratio. If you often pick the statements about starting conversations, extraversion comes out high, and that happens at the expense of another dimension. Together your five scores always average out at the same level.

How to read the result

For each dimension you see a bar and a word: high, middle or low. Below it, a few sentences say what that meant in your choices. Once enough people have taken the test, you also see how your pattern of choices compares with other players, in your own age group if you like.

A profile is not a medical test and not a judgment. It says which statements you felt fit you today, and a second try can come out a little different. If you want to know why you don't get a four-letter type here, read what personality type am I.