I took a standard Big Five inventory expecting it to tell me something I did not know. Instead it told me something I knew was wrong, and I could see which question had made it wrong while I was still answering.
My Neuroticism came out at the 7th percentile. Very low. Calm, hard to rattle, difficult to knock off balance — and for five of the six facets underneath it, that is accurate. Anxiety 12. Depression 6. Vulnerability 9. Anger 11.
Self-Consciousness: 94th.
That is an eighty-seven point spread inside a single domain. A domain score is the mean of its six facets, and the mean of that set is a number that describes no part of me. It says I am not easily disturbed, which is true, and it buries the one way in which I very much am.
This is not a flaw in the test
The instrument is good. It is public domain, it has been given to hundreds of thousands of people, and its facet structure has held up for twenty-five years. John Johnson, who built it, says plainly in his own materials that when the facets inside a domain disagree, you should trust the facets.
He is right. And almost no test built on his items says so anywhere a person will actually read it, because saying it undercuts the five big numbers at the top of the page.
The same thing happens elsewhere in my profile, more quietly. Openness came out at the 25th percentile, which reads as incurious. Five of its six facets sit between 30 and 54 — unremarkable. The sixth, Emotionality, is at 3, and it drags the whole domain down by itself. Nobody looking at "Openness: 25th" would think to check.
What I did about it
The site you are reading detects this case automatically. It is called domain coherence, it runs on every result, and when it fires the page says the broad score is misleading and points at the parts instead. That is the smallest of the three things this profile set off, and the easiest to justify: it is not a new idea, it is Johnson's own advice, wired up so that it happens rather than being available to anybody who reads the manual.
One thing to hold on to before any of the rest of this notebook. There is no weaker evidence for a construct than its designer recognising himself in it. I noticed a pattern in my own results and then built an instrument to measure that pattern. That is exactly the shape of a finding that turns out to be nothing, and every personal entry here is written under that caveat rather than around it.