About the test

The Big Five test on this site is built on open research. We did not write the questions. They come from an international research community that has made its measurement tools freely available to everyone, and we stand on their shoulders. Here we explain who they are, what the test measures, and how we calculate your result.

The five-factor model

The Big Five, or five-factor model, is the most widely used model of personality in modern psychology. It emerged over decades of research in which independent research groups kept finding the same five broad dimensions when analysing how people describe themselves and others:

• Openness to experience – imagination, curiosity and interest in new ideas
• Conscientiousness – structure, self-discipline and goal orientation
• Extraversion – social energy, initiative and need for stimulation
• Agreeableness – trust, empathy and willingness to cooperate
• Neuroticism – emotional sensitivity and reactions to stress

The model describes tendencies, not types. Everyone has a position on each trait, and no position is better than another.

IPIP: the questions are open to everyone

The questions in the test come from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), an open item library run by the Oregon Research Institute. IPIP was started by the personality researcher Lewis R. Goldberg, one of the architects of the Big Five, with a simple idea: personality measures should be in the public domain, so that researchers, students and everyone else can use, translate and improve them freely.

Today IPIP holds more than 3,000 items and over 250 scales, all in the public domain. Researchers around the world use them, and a large body of published studies documents how well they measure what they are meant to.

We are grateful for this work. Without IPIP, a free test of this quality would not be possible. Read more at ipip.ori.org.

Johnson and the IPIP-NEO-120

The test you take here is the IPIP-NEO-120, developed by Professor John A. Johnson at Pennsylvania State University. Johnson assembled IPIP items into an instrument that measures the same 30 facets as the commercial NEO PI-R, but with freely available questions. First as a 300-item version, and in 2014 as the shorter 120-item version we use.

The short form was developed from the responses of several hundred thousand people and is documented in the article Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120, published in the Journal of Research in Personality (doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003). Johnson has offered the test free online for many years, and it is his work that lets us give you a result with both five main domains and 30 facets.

How the result is calculated

• The test has 120 statements. Each of the five domains has six facets, and each facet is measured by four statements.
• You answer on a scale from "very inaccurate" to "very accurate", scoring 1 to 5 points. About half of the statements are reversed, so that "very accurate" gives a low score on the trait. This makes the test more robust against answering in one direction only.
• A facet score is the sum of its four statements, 4 to 20 points. A domain score is the sum of its 24 statements, 24 to 120 points. The percentage you see is how far up the scale you sit.
• The percentile under each trait compares your score with other people who answered the same 120 statements online: more than 400,000 complete answers collected by John A. Johnson in 2001–2011, mostly in English (Johnson, 2014). You choose the comparison group yourself: everyone, women or men, and an age group. The IPIP project publishes no official norms and advises caution with them (ipip.ori.org), so treat the percentile as a guide.
• An average below 2.5 per statement counts as low, above 3.5 as high, and everything in between as average. The texts in the report follow these levels.

The result is a self-report. It describes how you see yourself right now, not a diagnosis or a verdict. People change, and your answers can vary with mood and life situation.

From personality to relationships

Personality says a great deal about how we react, communicate and connect with others, but a relationship is also shaped by how two different perspectives work together. That is why we also created Pair Perspective, a free relationship test for couples. You both answer independently and then receive a shared result showing where you align, the strengths you have together, and differences that may be worth discussing.

Pair Perspective does not judge whether a relationship is “good” or “bad.” Its purpose is to give you a better starting point for curiosity and meaningful conversations. Try the free relationship test.

Free and open source

The test is free, needs no account, and the whole site is open source. The questions, the result texts and the scoring are all in the codebase, so anyone can check how we arrive at a result. It is the same openness IPIP is built on, and we believe it is the only right way to offer a personality test. The service is funded by advertising.

Translations are made by volunteers and partly with machine translation. If you find mistakes, we appreciate a note.

Who is behind it

Hi! I'm Jonas, a developer from Norway and, according to my own result, a fairly textbook introvert. I started bigfive-test.com in 2017 because I wanted a personality test that is free, honest about where its questions come from, and doesn't ask for your email address. Close to 8 million tests later, it is by far the biggest party I have ever hosted.

I don't write the questions myself. They come from the researchers behind IPIP. My job is the site, the code, and turning the science into plain language, preferably with headphones on.

I did not build the site alone. Thanks to Geir Gåsodden, who built the first scorer that calculates your result, and to Pål André Sundt, who made the site profitable so the test can stay free. And thanks to my mother, Eli Huseby, who translated the first version of the questions into Norwegian.

The site is run by B5 Holding AS in Norway. Questions, bugs or suggestions can be sent to bigfive-test@rubynor.com. The source code is on GitHub.