Concentric

It started with an ordinary act of test-taking. Answering the IPIP-NEO-120 out of curiosity, the Altruism and Sympathy items turned out to be unanswerable in a specific way — they ask about people in general, and for some people the honest answer depends entirely on who is being asked about.

The score that came back was technically defensible and substantively misleading. That gap — between a number that is correctly computed and a number that describes nobody — is the whole project.

• Free, with nothing behind a wall. No account, no email required, no paid report.
• Every number says how sure it is. A four-item scale carries real error, and printing a single figure claims a precision it does not have.
• Every comparison says who it is against. A percentile without a named reference group is close to meaningless.
• Contradictions are surfaced, not smoothed. When the parts of a trait disagree, that is usually the most useful thing we can tell you.
• The method is public. Every item, every formula, every limitation is on the methods page.

Built by Robert Ticknor. The research construct is published under the name Social Proximity Conditionality; the site is Concentric.

The Big Five items come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool. Our own items and data are dedicated to the public domain; the writing is CC BY 4.0. Details on the data page.

privacy@trovvy.com — for questions about the project, corrections, or anything to do with your own data.

If you are asking us to remove your answers, include the link to your results. It is the only handle that exists for them: there is no name, no email and no account on this site, so without the link there is no way to tell which answers are yours. See the privacy policy for why that is the design rather than an obstruction.