What's My Trait

Guides

Guides

The questions people ask, written as answers

Each guide takes one question, answers it in its first two sentences, then shows the evidence with the papers cited and says what it means for someone reading their own results. No guide gives life advice.

Reference pages

All guides

  • Are personality tests accurate? Good ones are, within limits: Big Five scales are reliable over months, predict real outcomes with small to moderate effects, and measure how you see yourself, which you can fake.
  • Can personality change? Yes, slowly and on average in a predictable direction: people become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally stable through adulthood, and most of the change is gradual.
  • Can you fake a personality test? Yes. People told to answer as an ideal applicant raise their Big Five scores by about half to one standard deviation, and real applicants raise conscientiousness and emotional stability most. Answering for yourself, there is nothing to gain.
  • What careers suit creative people? Creative people tend to score high on openness and on the artistic interest type. The jobs that fit are design, writing, music, performance and film, and creative work also turns up inside jobs that are not labelled creative.
  • How do character strengths relate to the Big Five? Most of the 24 character strengths map onto one or two Big Five traits, chiefly extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness, and neuroticism is the trait the strengths mostly leave out.
  • How does curiosity relate to openness? Curiosity is the appetite for finding things interesting; openness to experience is the broad Big Five trait it belongs to, which also covers imagination, art, feelings, variety and ideas.
  • Does self-esteem change over a lifetime? Yes: on average self-esteem rises from adolescence to about sixty, holds, then falls in old age, while people mostly keep their rank among their peers.
  • What does a high conscientiousness score mean at work? A high conscientiousness score means you organise your effort: plan, persist, keep order and think before acting. It is the Big Five trait that most consistently predicts job performance, with a modest effect.
  • What is a Holland code? A Holland code is your three highest of six vocational interest types, in order. It describes the kinds of work activity you would enjoy and maps to occupations that share the code.
  • What is honesty-humility? Honesty-humility is the HEXACO model's sixth trait: sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance and modesty. The Big Five has no factor for it and folds most of it into agreeableness.
  • How reliable is the Big Five? Reliable enough to use, and the figures are published: the thirty facets of the 120-item test have alphas of .63 to .88 in a sample of 619,150, the 50-item markers .79 to .87, and scores hold their rank over years.
  • How do I find my signature strengths? Your signature strengths are the handful, usually the top five, that come most naturally to you and feel most like you, and the test shows them as the highest markers on your strips.
  • Introvert, extrovert, ambivert: where is the line? There is no line. Extraversion is one continuous scale, most people sit near the middle, and ambivert is just the name for that crowded middle.
  • Is courage a personality trait? The readiness to take a stand, say the unpopular thing and face discomfort is a trait that can be measured. A single brave act is something else, and the scale does not predict one.
  • Is creativity a personality trait? Seeing yourself as an original thinker is a trait: it is stable, it sits inside openness to experience and it predicts creative achievement. Creative ability and creative output are different things, measured differently.
  • Is introversion the same as shyness? No. Introversion is a preference for less stimulation and smaller company; shyness is discomfort around people. The two are only modestly related and many people have one without the other.
  • Is orderliness the same as perfectionism? No. Orderliness is the liking for tidiness, plans and routine, one facet of conscientiousness. Perfectionism adds the drive to get work exactly right and the worry about getting it wrong, which belong to other traits.
  • Is patience a personality trait? Patience in the slow-to-anger sense is a trait: it is stable, it can be measured, and it sits inside agreeableness in one model of personality and inside neuroticism in another.
  • What jobs suit introverts? Introverts do well in almost every job. The evidence says extraversion predicts who emerges as a leader and who enjoys sales, not who performs well, so the useful question is about work activities, not job titles.
  • How does perseverance relate to conscientiousness? Perseverance is the tendency to finish what you start. In the Big Five it sits inside conscientiousness, and grit as usually measured is largely the same thing under another name.
  • How does self-esteem relate to the Big Five? Self-esteem relates most strongly to low neuroticism, then to extraversion, with smaller links to conscientiousness, openness and agreeableness.
  • Self-esteem vs confidence: what is the difference? Self-esteem is how much you value yourself as a whole, confidence is how sure you are that you can do a particular thing, and the two come apart more often than people expect.
  • What are the 24 character strengths? The 24 character strengths are the traits in Peterson and Seligman's classification, grouped under six virtues, and the site measures each with four items from the IPIP-VIA-R.
  • What are the six facets of extraversion? Extraversion is six related tendencies: friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement-seeking and cheerfulness, and the 120-item test scores each one separately.
  • Trait vs ability emotional intelligence: what is the difference? Trait emotional intelligence is how you describe your own emotional style, ability emotional intelligence is how well you solve emotion problems with right answers, and the two correlate only weakly.
  • How does trust relate to agreeableness? Trust is the first facet of agreeableness: the default assumption that people mean well and tell the truth. It is one facet of six, and a person can be trusting without being agreeable in the other five.
  • How do I use an interest test for a career change? Take it, read your three highest interest types, and compare them with what you do now. Interests are stable from the early twenties and predict performance and staying, so the gap between your code and your job is the useful finding.
  • What does a low agreeableness score mean? A low agreeableness score means you give less weight to other people's feelings when deciding what to say or do. It does not mean you are unkind, and it is not disagreeable in the everyday sense.
  • What does a percentile mean on a personality test? A percentile is the share of a comparison sample who scored below you, which is why a 50th percentile is average and a 95th is rare.
  • What does a Rosenberg self-esteem score mean? A Rosenberg score is the sum of ten statements about how you see yourself as a whole, from 10 to 40 on this site, and it measures global self-esteem rather than confidence in any skill.
  • What can an EQ score tell you, and what can it not? A self-report EQ score describes your emotional style as you see it, predicts work performance only weakly once personality is allowed for, and says nothing about emotional ability.
  • What is assertiveness, and what is it not? Assertiveness is the tendency to take charge, speak first and try to influence what happens. It is not aggression, not confidence and not a measure of being right.
  • What if my interests do not match my job? It is common, and it is information rather than a verdict. People whose interests fit their work perform somewhat better and are more likely to stay, with modest effects, and the mismatch is usually about activities within the job rather than the job itself.
  • What is emotional stability? Emotional stability is how readily negative feelings arise and how quickly they settle. It is the same trait as neuroticism, scored the other way up.
  • What does the Big Five measure? The Big Five are the five broad traits that keep appearing when people describe themselves and each other: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. They are descriptive, continuous and found across languages.
  • Which strengths should I put on a CV? Put on a CV the two or three character strengths you can show with a concrete example; the test is written for the person who takes it, never as a tool for employers to select with.