Personality & Individual Traits

The Big Five, with six facets per domain · 120 items · ~25 min

Public-domain item sets built to proxy the commercial NEO-PI-R. They correlate strongly with it, and they're free to use for any purpose, including embedding in your own tools. The 120-item version is the sweet spot between facet-level detail and your patience, while the 300-item version adds precision you probably don't need. bigfive-test.com is an open-source implementation that gives clean, facet-level results with no account.

• Take it online
• IPIP item pool (public domain)

The Big Five, with three facets per domain · 60 items · ~10 min

Soto & John's 2017 revision of the Big Five Inventory is probably the best short Big Five instrument available, with a carefully built facet structure and item balancing to control acquiescence bias. The authors offer it free for personal and research use, along with 30-item (BFI-2-S) and 15-item (BFI-2-XS) short forms for when time matters more than facets.

• Colby Personality Lab (forms + scoring)
• BFI-2 form (direct PDF)

Six trait dimensions: the familiar five plus Honesty–Humility · 100 items · ~15 min (60- and 200-item forms too)

Honesty–Humility (sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, modesty) joins the standard five here. It's the personality dimension most directly relevant to a moral profile, and the strongest personality-level predictor of ethical behavior and resistance to corruption. Growing lexical evidence across languages supports it as a genuine sixth factor rather than a Big Five variant. The official site, run by the model's creators (Lee & Ashton), offers free self- and observer-report forms. Having someone who knows you well fill in the observer form may be the single most informative thing on this page.

• hexaco.org (official)

The Big Five, six facets per domain (the commercial standard) · 240 items · ~40 min

Costa & McCrae's instrument is the commercial gold standard the IPIP-NEO was built to mirror. It's proprietary (Psychological Assessment Resources), and for self-use there's little reason to pay when the free IPIP-NEO delivers nearly identical information. Listed here mostly so you know what the citation trail points to.

• PAR (publisher)

The Big Five at domain level only · 10 items · ~1 min

Gosling's Ten-Item Personality Inventory trades reliability for brevity: two items per trait, written for research settings where every second counts. Fine as a rough sketch or for tracking. Don't expect facet insight or high internal consistency; it wasn't built to have either.

• TIPI (Gosling's lab)

Machiavellianism, narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy · 27 items · ~5 min

The well-established brief measure of the three classic dark traits, widely replicated. Known wrinkle: the Machiavellianism and psychopathy subscales correlate more strongly with each other than the theory would like. Self-report on socially undesirable traits is inherently noisy — answer as the person you are on a bad day, not the one you present at work.

• Interactive version
• Paulhus lab (UBC)

The Dark Triad plus everyday sadism · 28 items · ~5 min

Paulhus's 2021 update adds sadism as a fourth trait and revises the Machiavellianism items specifically to reduce their overlap with psychopathy. Initial cross-cultural replications (Polish, Romanian, Spanish samples) are promising, but it's still accumulating the independent evidence the SD3 already has.

• SD4 scale (direct download)

Four distinct facets: perspective-taking, empathic concern, personal distress, and fantasy · 28 items · ~5 min

Empathy isn't one thing, and this scale's lasting contribution is refusing to pretend otherwise. Cognitive empathy (perspective-taking) and affective empathy (empathic concern) are scored apart from the tendency to be personally overwhelmed by others' distress, three very different profiles that a single 'empathy score' would blur together. It remains the multidimensional standard, cited over ten thousand times.

• Full items + scoring (Eckerd College)

Self-reported empathy as a single score · 60 items · ~10 min

Baron-Cohen's scale from the Cambridge Autism Research Centre, widely used especially in autism research. Debates persist about its factor structure, and about how well self-reported empathy tracks actual empathic accuracy; that second gap applies to every scale in this section but is documented most thoroughly here. Treat it as a companion to the IRI.

• ARC test collection

Global self-esteem · 10 items · ~2 min

In use since 1965, translated into dozens of languages, and still the default self-esteem measure in research. Ten items, simple scoring, no gimmicks. This is what a good brief scale looks like.

• Scale + scoring (U. Maryland)

Perseverance and consistency of long-term interests · 10 items · ~3 min

Include this one with eyes open. Meta-analytic work finds grit correlates so strongly with Big Five conscientiousness that it adds little incremental prediction, and the 'consistency of interests' half carries most of the redundancy. Duckworth's own site takes and scores it, and the result is better read as a conscientiousness-adjacent lens than as a distinct trait.

• Take it online
• Scale PDFs

How you relate to yourself in difficulty: kindness vs. judgment, common humanity vs. isolation, mindfulness vs. over-identification · 26 items · ~5 min

Neff's scale anchors a large and growing literature. The main psychometric argument is whether the six subscales justify a single total score, since the negatively worded 'self-coldness' items may behave differently from the rest. Still the standard instrument, and the subscale profile is more informative than the total anyway.

• Take it online (self-compassion.org)