STATEMENT 1 / 200 of 20 answered
How accurately does this describe you?
"I am the life of the party."
What the Big Five is, in short
The Big Five describes personality as five independent traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Everyone has some amount of each, so your result is five positions on five scales, not a type.
The model came from analysing the words people use to describe each other: when thousands of adjectives were grouped statistically, the same five clusters kept appearing across languages. Half the statements here are reverse-scored, so agreeing with "I keep in the background" lowers your extraversion score.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Questionnaire
- Mini-IPIP, 20 items, 4 per trait
- Published
- 2006, Donnellan, Oswald, Baird & Lucas; public domain
- Scoring
- 1–5 per item, 4–20 per trait; 10 items reverse-scored
- Also called
- Five-factor model (FFM), OCEAN
EACH TRAIT HAS TWO ENDS AND SIX PARTS
Neither end of a scale is the good one
LOWER · ConventionalPrefers the familiar and practical. Likes clear, concrete ideas and proven ways of doing things.Strength:Grounded, focused and consistent.
HIGHER · CuriousDrawn to new ideas, art, imagination and abstract thinking. Enjoys variety and unusual experiences.Risk:Can chase novelty at the expense of finishing things.
SIX FACETS (NEO-PI-R)The Mini-IPIP is too short to score facets. Longer questionnaires such as the 120-item IPIP-NEO report all 30.
FantasyAestheticsFeelingsActionsIdeasValues
40–60%of the differences between people are geneticTwin studies put the heritability of each Big Five trait in roughly this range. The rest comes from experiences that aren't shared within a family.3
1990From words to traits. Lewis Goldberg's analyses of English trait adjectives kept producing the same five broad factors.1
2006 · n≈2,600The short form. Five studies showed the 20-item Mini-IPIP tracks its 50-item parent closely, with acceptable reliability for a 4-item scale.2
2006 · metaPeople mature. Across 92 samples, conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to rise through adulthood and neuroticism tends to fall.4
2007 · reviewTraits predict outcomes. Big Five scores predicted health, divorce and job success about as well as income and education did.5
- Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229.
- Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., & Lucas, R. E. (2006). The Mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 192–203.
- Jang, K. L., Livesley, W. J., & Vernon, P. A. (1996). Heritability of the Big Five personality dimensions and their facets: A twin study. Journal of Personality, 64(3), 577–591.
- Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25.
- Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313–345.