Terms of use

A free, open personality assessment for research and self-understanding. It administers the public-domain IPIP-NEO-120 alongside an experimental module measuring how trait expression varies with social closeness.

You must be 18 or over to take it. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger, and a stated age under 18 produces no percentile at all rather than being clamped into the youngest band.

• Not a clinical or diagnostic instrument. It cannot detect, diagnose, rule out or treat any condition. If something here worries you, that is a reason to speak to a professional, not a finding.
• Not for employment, selection or screening. Do not use it to make decisions about hiring, admission, custody, insurance, lending or any other consequential judgement about another person. The reliability figures we publish are not adequate for that, which is precisely why we publish them.
• Not IRB-approved institutional research. It is an independent open project, conducted to the standards described on /methods, without institutional oversight.
• Not advice. Nothing here is medical, psychological, legal or financial advice.

We promise to tell you how uncertain each number is, and we do — every percentile ships with an interval, its reference group and that group’s size. We do not promise the numbers are right about you.

Personality instruments measure what people report about themselves on one occasion. They are useful, they are not oracles, and long flattering descriptions are accepted as accurate even when randomly generated. That effect is why our copy stays specific, hedged and occasionally unflattering.

The closeness module in particular is a research bet that may not survive contact with data. It is labelled provisional wherever it appears. If it fails its pre-registered conditions, we will publish that.

You keep no account and we hold no identity for you, so “your data” means the responses attached to your retrieval code. Keep the code and you can return to your results, retake, or withdraw entirely. Lose it and we cannot recover it for you, because we have nothing to identify you by — which is the same property that makes the data safe.

Full detail on /privacy and /consent.

You may run your own copy of this instrument, on your own site, for any purpose including a commercial one, without asking us. Citation formats are on /data. We would like to be cited; you are not required to.

One request rather than a condition: if you modify the items, change the version identifier. Scores from modified items are not comparable to ours, and a shared version number claiming they are would corrupt anyone who pooled them.

“NEO”, “NEO-PI-R” and “NEO PI-3” are trademarks of PAR, Inc., who are not affiliated with this project and have not endorsed it. We refer to IPIP-NEO-120 only as a citation of a source instrument, never as a product name, and we use no PAR material. The IPIP items themselves are public domain and are not PAR’s.

Concentric and Trovvy are our own marks.

This is a free service run on a shared server. It may be slow, unavailable, or changed without notice, and results may be rescored if we fix a bug in the scoring engine — every rescoring is recorded as a new run rather than overwriting the old one, so a number that moves is an auditable event.

To the extent the law allows, the service is provided as is, without warranty, and we are not liable for any loss arising from its use or unavailability. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing here affects your statutory rights.

The site carries minimal advertising to cover hosting. Adverts never appear while you are taking the assessment or on your results, they are visually separated from content, and no data you provide is shared with any advertiser or used to target them.

Material changes are dated at the top of this page. Consent to participate in research is versioned separately and is never changed retroactively: your responses stay governed by the consent text you actually agreed to, which is stored with a hash of that text.