Quick personality test

Each of the five traits runs between two ends, and most people are somewhere in between. Being quiet is not worse than being outgoing, and being easy-going is not worse than being organised. The result describes how you see yourself today, in your own answers, and the sentences say it in everyday words: outgoing or quiet, warm or direct, organised or easy-going, calm or sensitive, open to new things or down-to-earth.

Where a published study allows it, we also say how your answers compare with the people in it. The authors of the questionnaire asked 1,813 students at a university in the United States the same ten statements and published the averages^[1]. So a sentence such as "more outgoing than about 7 in 10 of the students in the study" compares you with them, not with everyone. Students are younger than most people, and one university is not a country.

Organised or easy-going is not in the table, and we do not compare it with anyone yet. The paper prints a spread for that trait that does not fit the spreads of its own groups of women and men, and until that has been settled we would rather show nothing than a comparison we cannot stand behind. Your own score for it is shown like the others.

The test is the Ten-Item Personality Inventory of Samuel Gosling, Peter Rentfrow and William Swann^[1]. Its authors allow anyone to use it for any purpose, and they tested it against much longer questionnaires: for a test of 10 statements, its scores agree well with theirs, but each trait rests on two statements only, so it gives a sketch, not a portrait. We show the statements in the authors' own English words, in their order, with their seven answers.

• Each trait is the average of its two statements, one of them counted backwards.
• You may leave out a statement where the result still stands, but never one of the two about outgoing or quiet, the trait every result is headed by. A trait that loses one of its two statements has too few answers to be scored, and the result says so.
• Your answers are saved in this browser after each statement, and kept for a month if you stop. Once your result is saved, the unfinished sheet is deleted.
• If you answer very quickly, in under a second per statement on average, the result is shown but not compared with anyone, and it says so in plain words.

Below are the statements, how they are scored, the licence and the paper, exactly as we use them.

Personality is fairly steady over the years, but answers to a short questionnaire move a little from day to day. A tiring week, a recent argument or a good holiday can tip one answer by a point, and with two statements per trait one point moves the score half a point. If you take the test again in a month, expect most traits to land in the same place or one fifth away.

Each statement is a pair, such as "Critical, quarrelsome", and you may feel that one word fits you and the other does not. The authors ask you to rate the pair as a whole, even if one word applies more strongly than the other. Pick the answer that comes closest; there is a middle answer for a pair you cannot agree or disagree with.

• Outgoing or quiet (extraversion): how much you look for company, talk and action.
• Warm or direct (agreeableness): how much you put getting along first.
• Organised or easy-going (conscientiousness): how much you plan, keep order and finish things.
• Calm or sensitive (emotional stability): how strongly worries and moods reach you.
• Open to new things or down-to-earth (openness): how much you look for new ideas and experiences.

Researchers who study personality keep finding these five broad traits in many languages and countries. Longer questionnaires look at each of them from many sides; this one asks two questions about each, which is why it takes two minutes and not twenty.