The 24 character strengths are the positive traits in Peterson and Seligman’s classification of character, each a stable way of thinking, feeling and acting that is valued in its own right and not only for what it brings. They are grouped under six broad virtues, and the test on this site measures each strength with four items.
The classification
Peterson and Seligman (2004) set out to do for good character what the Big Five did for personality: list the traits that recur across cultures and philosophies and define each one carefully. They read the moral traditions of several civilisations, kept the qualities that appeared in most of them and that met a list of criteria, such as being valued in themselves and having obvious opposites, and arrived at 24 strengths under six virtues.
Wisdom holds creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning and perspective. Courage holds bravery, perseverance, honesty and zest. Humanity holds capacity for love, kindness and social intelligence. Justice holds teamwork, fairness and leadership. Temperance holds forgiveness, modesty, prudence and self-regulation. Transcendence holds appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humour and spirituality.
The published names are often compounds, such as Industry/Perseverance/Persistence and Valor/Bravery/Courage; the site shows one word from each and keeps the full name in the data file and the sources box.
What the 24 do not mean
The six virtues are a way of organising the list, not six things the test measures. When researchers factor-analyse scores on the 24 strengths, they do not recover the six virtues. McGrath (2015) pooled very large samples from several countries and found that the strengths fall instead into three broad groups, which he called caring, inquisitiveness and self-control. The site reports the 24 strengths and no virtue scores.
The strengths are not ranked against other people. No norm sample is published for the IPIP-VIA-R, so the site draws each marker against the possible range of 4 to 20 and does not invent a percentile. A low marker on a strength means you describe yourself as having little of it, not that you lack something others have. The scores are not a diagnosis of anything.
What it means for your results
The test uses the IPIP-VIA-R, a public-domain set of 24 four-item scales built by Bluemke, Partsch, Saucier and Lechner (2021) to measure constructs similar to the 24 strengths, with balanced keying and items chosen to work across cultures. The items are short statements such as Feel it’s important to live in a world of beauty. Four items is short, so any single strength can move a few points between attempts; the published two-to-three-week test-retest reliabilities for the UK and German samples run from .55 to .82. Read the strips from the top: which strengths sit highest is steadier than any one score.
The character strengths test has 96 items, takes ten minutes, is scored on your device and shows all 24 strengths on strips so the highest ones stand out.