TIPI: the Big Five in ten questions, and what you give up for the speed

Most researchers who measure personality use the Big Five: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. A good Big Five questionnaire has 40 to 100 or more statements. That is fine in a lab, but too long for a survey where personality is one question block among many.

In 2003 Samuel Gosling, Jason Rentfrow and William Swann published the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) for exactly that situation. It measures all five traits with ten items, two per trait, and takes about a minute. Gosling released it into the public domain, and it has since been used in thousands of studies. Our TIPI test uses the original items.

How the items work

Each item is a pair of adjectives, and you rate how well the pair describes you on a scale from 1 to 7. Every trait gets one pair pointing one way and one pointing the other:

• Extraversion: "extraverted, enthusiastic" and "reserved, quiet"
• Agreeableness: "sympathetic, warm" and "critical, quarrelsome"
• Conscientiousness: "dependable, self-disciplined" and "disorganized, careless"
• Neuroticism, the opposite of emotional stability: "anxious, easily upset" and "calm, emotionally stable"
• Openness: "open to new experiences, complex" and "conventional, uncreative"

The reversed pair is flipped and averaged with the first, so each trait gets a score from 1 to 7.

What you give up for the speed

Two items per trait cannot cover a trait the way twenty can. Conscientiousness, for example, includes orderliness, diligence and caution. The TIPI touches them with four adjectives and nothing more.

In the original paper the TIPI scores still lined up well with a 44-item Big Five questionnaire, with correlations between about .65 and .87 depending on the trait, and they were fairly stable when people took the test again six weeks later. Openness was the weakest trait. The internal consistency figures are low, which the authors expected: the two items per trait were chosen to cover different sides of it, not to repeat each other.

In practice, the TIPI gives a reasonable rough sketch. A difference of half a point between you and a friend means little. A difference of three points probably means something.

When the short version is enough, and when it is not

The TIPI is enough when you want a quick first look, or when you want to compare yourself across time and are willing to take it again in the same way.

Choose a longer test when the result matters to a decision, or when you want to see the facets inside each trait. Our Big Five test has 50 items and gives a more stable picture. If you want to see how honesty and humility fit in, try the HEXACO test, which adds a sixth factor.

Reading your profile

There is no good or bad Big Five profile. Low extraversion is not a flaw, and high agreeableness is not always a strength, for example in a negotiation. The interesting part is usually the combination: someone high on openness and low on conscientiousness tends to start many projects and finish few, while the reverse pattern describes a reliable person who prefers the familiar.

For what each trait means in daily life, read the Big Five: what does it really say about you. If you have taken a type-based test before and wonder why the results differ, see MBTI vs the Big Five: which personality test is better.