The Big Five
OCEAN: the most researched model of personality
Free, no account needed.
This test measures the five broad traits that personality researchers rely on more than any other model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, each split into two finer aspects.
You will read 80 short scenes and statements from everyday life. Rate how well each one describes you as you usually are, not as you would like to be. If a situation never happens to you, imagine how you would most likely react. There are no right answers and no better or worse profiles: every pole of every trait has its strengths and its costs.
What it measures
Openness
Down-to-earth ↔ Open
Openness to experience: your appetite for ideas, imagination, art and the unfamiliar.
Conscientiousness
Spontaneous ↔ Disciplined
How much you organize, plan and push yourself to finish what you start.
Extraversion
Reserved ↔ Outgoing
How much you seek out people, excitement and the spotlight, and how readily you take charge.
Agreeableness
Tough-minded ↔ Accommodating
How much you put others' feelings, cooperation and harmony ahead of your own agenda.
Neuroticism
Calm ↔ Reactive
How strongly and how often you experience negative emotions such as worry, irritation and discouragement.
Intellect
Engagement with ideas: curiosity about how things work and a love of reasoning and abstract puzzles.
Aesthetics
Sensitivity to beauty, art and music, and a rich, absorbing imagination.
Industriousness
Drive and self-discipline: working steadily toward goals and finishing what you start.
Orderliness
A preference for tidiness, routine, planning and getting the details right.
Enthusiasm
Sociability and positive emotion: enjoying company, making friends, feeling joy and excitement.
Assertiveness
Social confidence and the drive to lead: speaking up, taking charge and influencing others.
Compassion
Emotional concern for others: empathy, care and the urge to help.
Politeness
Respect and restraint: courtesy, cooperation and holding back aggression.
Volatility
How easily emotions flare outward: irritability, anger and quick changes of mood.
Withdrawal
How much stress turns inward: worry, self-doubt, discouragement and sensitivity to criticism.
Possible results
About this test
The Big Five grew out of the lexical hypothesis: if a difference between people matters, language will have words for it. From the 1930s researchers combed dictionaries for trait adjectives, and from the 1960s onward factor analyses of how people describe themselves and each other kept returning the same five broad clusters. Lewis Goldberg named them the Big Five, and Paul Costa and Robert McCrae developed them into the Five Factor Model. The domains are often remembered as OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.
In 2007 Colin DeYoung, Lena Quilty and Jordan Peterson showed that each domain splits into two aspects: Intellect and Aesthetics (their term was Openness), Industriousness and Orderliness, Enthusiasm and Assertiveness, Compassion and Politeness, Volatility and Withdrawal. This test measures all ten with original items; each item counts toward its aspect and its domain. Your result is the pole of the domain where you stand out most, and the five-letter code uses the SLOAN notation (Social or Reserved, Limbic or Calm, Organized or Unstructured, Accommodating or Egocentric, Inquisitive or Non-curious).
No model in personality psychology has stronger scientific support: the five traits appear across cultures, are partly heritable, fairly stable in adulthood, and predict outcomes from job performance to health. Still, self-report captures how you see yourself today. Scores are positions within the range of possible answers, not percentiles against population norms: 70% means you leaned clearly toward that pole, not that you outscored 70% of people.
References
- Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216-1229.
- McCrae, R. R. & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 81-90.
- DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C. & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 880-896.
- John, O. P., Naumann, L. P. & Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy. In Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (3rd ed.).
- Soto, C. J. (2019). How replicable are links between personality traits and consequential life outcomes? Psychological Science, 30, 711-727.
- Howard, P. J. & Howard, J. M. (1995). The Big Five Quickstart: An introduction to the Five-Factor Model of Personality (SLOAN notation).
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
The Big Five
About 10 minutes · 80 questions
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