Background

The big five personality traits are the best accepted and most commonly used model of personality in academic psychology. If you take a college course in personality psychology, this is what you will learn about. The big five come from the statistical study of responses to personality items. Using a technique called factor analysis researchers can look at the responses of people to hundreds of personality items and ask the question "what is the best was to summarize an individual?". This has been done with many samples from all over the world and the general result is that, while there seem to be unlimited personality variables, five stand out from the pack in terms of explaining a lot of a persons answers to questions about their personality: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. The big-five are not associated with any particular test, a variety of measures have been developed to measure them. This test uses the Big-Five Factor Markers from the International Personality Item Pool, developed by Goldberg (1992).

Procedure

The test consists of fifty items that you must rate on how true they are about you on a five point scale where 1=Disagree, 3=Neutral and 5=Agree. It takes most people 3-8 minutes to complete.

Participation

Your use of this tool should be for educational or entertainment purposes only. The results of this test are not psychological or psychiatric advice of any kind and come with no guarantee of accuracy or fitness for a particular purpose. Responses to this test will be recorded anonymously (without any personality identifying information), and may be used for research or otherwise distributed.