What Is the Big Five Personality Test? The Five Traits Explained

The five traits at a glance

• Openness: curiosity, imagination and interest in new ideas and experiences.
• Conscientiousness: organization, self-discipline and follow-through.
• Extraversion: sociability, energy and enjoyment of stimulation.
• Agreeableness: warmth, trust and cooperation versus directness and skepticism.
• Emotional sensitivity: how strongly you react to stress and setbacks (neuroticism).

Each trait is a continuum. Most people score somewhere in the middle on most traits, and every point on the scale has advantages in some situations.

Where the Big Five comes from

The model grew out of the lexical hypothesis: the idea that the most important differences between people are captured in everyday language. In 1936, psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert collected around 18,000 English words describing people. Later researchers grouped these words statistically to see which ones tend to go together.

In the 1960s, studies by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, and by Warren Norman, repeatedly found five broad clusters. Lewis Goldberg popularized the name "Big Five" in the 1980s, and Paul Costa and Robert McCrae developed widely used questionnaires for what they called the five-factor model. Since then, the same five dimensions have been found in many languages and cultures, although the details vary.

How the Big Five personality test works

A Big Five test presents statements such as "I start conversations with people I don't know" and asks how well each one describes you, usually on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Some statements are worded in the opposite direction, which helps balance out the tendency to agree with everything. Your answers for each trait are added up and converted into a score.

Our free Big Five personality test uses 60 original statements, 12 per trait, written in the style of the public-domain International Personality Item Pool. Scores run from 0 to 100. You can read exactly how scoring works on our methodology page.

What your scores can and can't tell you

Big Five scores are useful for understanding your tendencies: how you recharge, how you approach tasks, how you handle conflict and stress. In large studies, the traits relate modestly to outcomes such as job performance, relationship satisfaction, health habits and well-being. Conscientiousness, for example, is one of the more consistent personality predictors of work and study results.

But personality is only one part of the picture. Skills, circumstances, values and choices matter a great deal, and a single test is a snapshot rather than a verdict. Use your results as a starting point for reflection, not a label.

Does personality change?

Big Five traits are fairly stable in adulthood, but they do change. On average, people become more conscientious and agreeable and less emotionally reactive as they move through early and middle adulthood, a pattern researchers call the maturity principle. Twin studies suggest that genetics account for roughly half of the differences between people, with life experiences making up much of the rest.

The Big Five vs. type-based personality tests

Many popular personality tests sort people into types, such as four-letter codes. Types are easy to remember, but they split people at a single point, so someone just above the line and someone just below it get different labels even though they're nearly identical. The Big Five measures traits on a scale instead, which researchers generally consider more reliable and informative.

We give you both: your five trait scores, and one of 16 personality types built from those scores as a quick, shareable summary. When a score is close to the middle, we tell you, so you know which parts of the type fit you less strongly.

Big 5 personality test FAQs