How we score the personality profile
"Higher than 7 in 10 people" means nothing until you know which people. Here's the questionnaire, the people you're compared with, and the ways they don't look like everyone.
The questionnaire
It's the IPIP-NEO-120, a free, public questionnaire published by John A. Johnson in 2014. It measures the same thirty detail traits as the well-known commercial test, the NEO-PI-R, with four statements for each detail trait and twenty-four for each of the five big traits. It's been checked by other researchers, and you can read the paper yourself.
How your answers become scores
You rate each statement from 1 to 5. Some statements are worded the other way round, so we flip those first. Then we add up the statements for each trait. That's all there is to it, with no weighting and no secret formula.
Compared with people your age and sex
Personality shifts with age. Conscientiousness tends to climb through your twenties, and neuroticism tends to drift down. Comparing a 19-year-old with a 55-year-old on one scale hides that. So we compare you with people your own age and sex, and the comparison means something.
10–13 and 14–17 are in the comparison data, but we don't offer the test to them. You must be 18 or over to take the questionnaire.
Both questions are optional, and you can answer one without the other. That makes four possible comparisons, and your report names the one it used beside every result:
- Age and sex given: people your age and sex. A man aged 25–34 is compared with men aged 25–34.
- Age given, sex not: people your age, men and women together.
- Sex given, age not: people your sex, of any age.
- Neither given: all 619,150 people at once.
Who you're compared with
619,150 people who chose to take the same questionnaire online. That's a lot of people, but they are not a random slice of any country. They lean young and English-speaking, and roughly 60 in 100 are women. Your result shows where you sit among those people, and your report says so rather than calling them "everyone".
This matters most at the extremes and least in the middle. A result in the middle is a solid "typical". A result higher than 95 in 100 means "high among people your age and sex who took this online", which isn't quite the same as "high among everyone".
This is not an intelligence test
Nothing here measures ability. The trait called Intellect measures how much you enjoy ideas and abstract thinking, not how good you are at them. People who score high on it aren't measurably better reasoners, and a low score is not a verdict on your mind. If you want to measure reasoning, take the matrix test; it's free too.
What this is not
It's not a clinical test and not a diagnosis. A high neuroticism score is not an anxiety disorder. Nothing here should be used for hiring or for any decision about another person. And describing yourself has real limits: it shows how you see yourself on the day you answered.