A Big Five assessment that measures one more thing
Your personality is not one number.
It changes with who you are with.
Standard personality tests ask how helpful, how trusting, how sociable you are — in general. They return a single score per trait and assume you are roughly the same person toward everyone.
For a lot of people that is simply false. Someone can be guarded with strangers and close to unconditional with the few people inside their circle. Asked to answer for “people in general”, they end up describing an average they have never once behaved like.
Concentric asks the same questions at four different distances — your inner circle, friends, acquaintances, and strangers — and shows you the shape of the change.
- 120
- public-domain items, unmodified
- 30
- facets, each with a confidence interval
- —
- profiles (count available once the site is live)
What is different here
- Every score comes with a range. A trait measured with four items carries real error. Almost every other test prints a single number anyway. We show you how sure we actually are.
- We say who you are compared to. Not “the 72nd percentile” but the 72nd percentile among a named group, with its size stated.
- We flag when a score is misleading. When the narrow traits inside a broad one disagree, the broad score is an average of a contradiction — so we de-emphasise it and show you the parts instead.
- We show what an average is hiding. Each trait is asked three different ways, and your results draw the spread of those three behind the combined line. Where they agree it reads as one confident curve. Where they pull apart, the average is describing a pattern you do not actually have — and that is the part worth reading.
- We tell you when we cannot tell. There is a difference between “these are the same” and “we could not tell them apart”, and most tests report the second as if it were the first. We do not name a pattern the data cannot support, and we say so rather than going quiet.
- You can see every item. Drill into any score and read the exact questions behind it, and how you answered each one.
The Compass
Your results also come with a five-letter code and a named type — one letter per trait, thirty-two combinations. It is the part people actually remember, and the part that is easiest to abuse, so it is built to refuse.
- A letter is only assigned when the evidence clears the midpoint. If your interval straddles the middle on a trait, that letter is left blank rather than rounded to whichever side happens to be nearer. Most typologies round.
- Fewer than three firm letters and you get no type at all — you get The Fulcrum, which is not a consolation prize but the honest reading of a profile that sits near the middle.
- It is a summary, not a category. Two people sharing a code can differ a great deal inside it. The code is the headline; the facets underneath are the article.
Browse all thirty-two types — each one written out in full, with what it tends to get right and what it tends to cost.
The Big Five core here is solid, externally normed, and comparable to any other test built on the same public-domain items. The closeness measure is a genuine research bet that may not survive contact with data — it is labelled provisional everywhere it appears, and if it fails we will publish that. The profile that started it · explore the population · take the data