A free personality test built on the Big Five

This free personality test maps you on the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. It takes about 8 minutes, needs no sign-up, and uses public-domain questions from a well-known research pool. You finish with a picture of your tendencies, on scales rather than in a box.

What the test measures

The Big Five is a model of five broad traits. Each is a scale, and every point on it has its own strengths.

• Openness: how much you tend to seek out new ideas, art and experiences, or prefer what you know works.
• Conscientiousness: how much you tend to plan and follow through, or keep things flexible and go with the moment.
• Extraversion: how much you tend to draw energy from people and activity, or from quieter settings.
• Agreeableness: how much you tend to put harmony and other people's needs first, or hold your ground and challenge things.
• Emotional stability: how evenly you tend to ride out stress, or how strongly you feel its ups and downs.

A low score isn't a bad score. Someone lower in agreeableness may be the person who says what needs saying. Someone lower in openness may be the steady one everyone relies on.

The science behind it

Core Personality uses items from the International Personality Item Pool, or IPIP, a public-domain collection that researchers can use freely. Specifically, it uses the IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers, the 50-item version. These build on Lewis Goldberg's 1992 paper on developing markers for the Big-Five structure. Goldberg and colleagues later described the pool and its role in making personality measures open to everyone.

Big Five traits do seem to connect with real life. In a large replication project, Christopher Soto retested 78 published links between these traits and life outcomes. Overall, 87% of the attempts were statistically significant in the expected direction, and effects were typically 77% as strong as the originals.

Traits also relate to what you actually do. In 15 experience-sampling studies, William Fleeson and Patrick Gallagher found that self-reported traits strongly predicted how people typically behaved from day to day.

Two honest limits are worth knowing. First, those studies are about populations, so they can't tell you what will happen in your life. Second, while the items have a published research history, Selfcarta's way of presenting them has not had its own independent validation study, so we don't quote accuracy figures for it.

Why self-report is only half the map

A questionnaire captures how you see yourself. That view is valuable, but it has gaps, as we explain in how accurately people rate themselves. This is where Second Sight comes in. People who know you can answer a 20-item version of the Core Personality Expedition about you, so you can see where their picture and yours differ.

Anonymity is built in. Friends, family and co-workers are shown only as averages, combined with at least two other raters. The Partner circle is the exception: it is a named, one-to-one comparison, and your partner is told that before they begin.

How to get the most from it

Answer as you usually are, not as you would like to be or as you are on your best day. Try not to overthink it, because your first reaction is usually fine. It can also help to pick one everyday setting, such as how you are during a normal week, and stick to it.

When you get your result, look for what rings true and what surprises you. Surprises are often the most useful part. And if you would like to know how much of this can shift over time, read can your personality change?