The Top Five Big Five “OCEAN” Free Online Questionnaires
Recently I completed about ten online questionnaires that test for the Big Five set of personality traits. The acronym “OCEAN” provides an easy way to remember these traits, which are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
For anyone familiar with the Jungian Archetype traits popularized by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI (r), these questionnaires are similar. Indeed, four of the Big Five traits — all but Neuroticism — do in fact correlate with Jungian Archetypes to a certain degree.
The NEO PI-R Is the Real, but Non-Free, Deal
Anyone willing to pay $92 for an official Big Five Questionnaire should head to parinc.com and take the NEO PI-R as soon as possible. I say “as soon as possible” because if you’re going to spend $92, I recommend going in with as little information as possible, to help minimize possible bias.
Written by Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae, the NEO PI-R is the gold standard for Big Five questionnaires. Intended for use in clinical environments, the site says you will need to find a psychiatrist to administer it.
Costa and McCrae have been working with the Five Factor Model of Personality for decades, and everything I’ve read about the Big Five refers to them and their work at some point.
The wikipedia page for the NEO PI-R is an excellent source of background information on the questionnaire but beware, it is rife with spoilers!
For cheapskates like me who want something as close as possible to the NEO PI-R without the expense, I suggest checking out #2 in my list below.
Runners Up
Before getting to the Top Five, I will list the questionnaires that were fun, but didn’t make it to the list. As a Big Fan of these sorts of questionnaires I believe it’s important to take as many as possible and see where the results agree, rather than take the word of just one of them.
If you’re in a rush, feel free to skip this section.
The Psych Central Personality Test at psychcentral.com contains just 50 questions and is stylish and friendly. The results include a nice graph and the site has other questionnaires at https://psychcentral.com/quizzes/. Compared to some of the others, this is a fairly serious site with a lot more than just quizzes.
The Big Five Personality Test at truity.com presents its 60 questions on three pages, each containing 20 items. The site is styled nicely, and it’s home page includes links to other quizzes, but once you get your results they constantly pester you to buy their Full Report.
The Free Personality Quiz at scienceofpeople.com contains just 44 questions, making it the shortest one of all those I tried. The site is more personal than the others, and it’s clear the goal of it is to sell Vanessa Van Edwards’ book Captivate, The Science of Succeeding with People. This is the first Big Five site I’ve seen to discuss Facial Mapping, which is something I personally am not interested in right now, but may want to come back to.
The last but not least runner up site is the Find Your Star Wars Twin quiz at outofservice.com. It contains just 45 questions making it the second-shortest quiz in this list. I was a little disappointed that it matched me up with not just one but five characters — one for each of the Big Five Traits. However, as far as I’m concerned, anything related to Star Wars is fun!
Before getting to the Top Five List proper, there is one site that deserves Honorable Mention.
Honorable Mention
#6 HEXACO
I’m putting the Hexaco Personality Inventory — Revised at Hexaco.org in the #6 slot of my Top Five list because it is not really a Big Five Questionnaire.
The researchers behind this site are interested in a sixth factor in addition to the Big Five: Honesty and Humility. HEXACO is their acronym for Honesty, Emotional Stability — the opposite of the Big Five’s Neuroticism, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. The questionnaire includes very Goldilocksy — not too many, not too few — 100 items, and the addition of the Honesty and Humility trait makes it a bit different from the others.
In addition to scoring you on their six Big Five + 1 traits, this questionnaire also scores you on the facets they find in these traits. This allows you to drill down into more detail about why your score is what it is.
The nicest thing about the Hexaco Personality Inventory — Revised, however, is the graphs they provide of the results. Where the graphs on the other sites show your score in absolute terms, the HEXACO researchers provide your results as measures relative to the other people who have answered the questionnaire. This is easiest to understand by looking at a screenshot of the results.
The red lines shows the median results of others who have answered the questionnaire. Half of the respondents have scored above this median, and the other half below it. The gray band in turn shows you the median 80% of scores, which range from the bottom 10% to the upper 90%.
As the screenshot shows, I am not just “high” in Honesty-Humility, Sincerity, Greed-Avoidance, and Fearfulness, I am what you could call “off the charts high!”
In the interest of full disclosure, at this time, in late May of 2020, I am experiencing an unusually high level of fearfulness because I am 65 and have high blood pressure, making me more at risk of developing complications from the coronavirus than most other people.
In contrast, note that I am “off the charts low” on Anxiety. This makes perfect sense because, although I am at risk of complications, I also am Introverted and so quite happy to be alone. Also, although I am hardly living “high on the hog,” I feel fortunate to have enough savings to get by. Perhaps most importantly, I have a complicated, long-term project (visualizing personalities)to take my mind off things.
Briefly then, having results for the facets is a very nice feature, indeed.
Answering this questionnaire adds your results — anonymously, of course — to the database with other respondents’ results, thus helping the researchers, so I encourage everyone to give it a try!
If you are interested in learning more about the Hexaco Personality Inventory — Revised questionnaire, there is a page in the wikipedia about it, and the researchers’ books on the subject are for sale on their site.
The Top Five
Finally, here is the promised list of the Top Five Big Five “OCEAN” Free Online Questionnaires!
#5 OutOfService.com
The Big Five Project Personality Test at outofservice.com is a quick-and-easy single page test containing only 61 items. As is frequently the case, there are a few additional questions they like to ask, but ignoring those this is the second-shortest test in this Top Five list.
The screenshot shows a graph of my results, and they’re consistent with how I did on the others.
The site’s home page links to other Personality Tests, including the Find Your Star Wars Twin test mentioned as a runner up. That’s the only other one of the tests on this site that I have done, at least for now. The people behind this site appear to mostly be more fun than serious.
#4 OpenPsychometrics.org
The Big Five Personality Test at openpsychometrics.org is a bit shorter and more serious. Its 50 questions come from the International Personality Item Pool or IPIP, meaning the questions or “items” are open source — like Linux, LibreOffice, and the Gimp — and free for others to use.
The OpenPsychometrics.org home page lists other open source questionnaires, including a Self-esteem scale, the business-oriented DISC assessment, an IQ Test, and a Short Dark Triad Test. I took a few of these and thoroughly enjoyed each and every one!
This site contains more quizzes than the #5 ranked OutOfService.com, and is a bit more serious about all this as well. Interestingly, it recommends the Big Five Test for people more interested in “scientific validity,” and a Jungian Type Scales test — which is similar to the MBTI (r) — for people more interested in “personal enjoyment.”
#3 Personal.PSU.edu — 120-Item Short Version of the IPIP-NEO
The International Personality Item Pool or IPIP does not contain any questionnaires you can answer. Rather, it serves as an online warehouse for the open-source items that appear in some of these personality tests. For more about the IPIP, see the section below entitled “Move Along, No Questionnaires Here,” immediately following this Top Five List.
The IPIP site refers people wanting to answer a questionnaire to a page giving visitors the option to take The IPIP-NEO. The short, 120-item version of this test comes in at #3 on my Top Five List.
These two IPIP-NEO tests lack the style and flash of the other sites, but more than make up for that lack in their content.
In other words, it looks like these tests are pretty “old school.” The introductory pages include warnings that the test might not work, but it appears that these caveats are out-dated. I did not experience any issues, and got the impression the warnings are anachronistic and probably due to people trying to answer the questionnaires with slow computers, slow connections, or both.
If you want to try one of these, and are easily frustrated, you might want to try them on a real computer with a high-speed connection, rather than on your phone out somewhere with spotty service. That’s just a hunch, but like they say, it would suck to answer 100–300 questions and get no return on your efforts.
#2 Personal.PSU.edu — 300-Item Original IPIP-NEO
The Original IPIP-NEO is the longer, 300-item of the two questionnaires referred to by the IPIP site, and it comes in at #2 on my Top Five List.
Again, what this questionnaire might lack in spit-and-polish is more than made up for by it’s genuine content.
Although I have never taken Costa and McCrae’s NEO PI-R — discussed briefly at the start of this article — I feel confident that this questionnaire is about as close as you can get to it without shelling out the $92.
The 300 questions allow the test to assess not just the five factors but also six facets of each factor, for a total of 30 traits — actually 35 total if you include each of the Big Five “parent” traits.
These facets are similar to those used in the Hexaco Personality Inventory, honorably mentioned as #6 in this Top Five list, but differ slightly. As interesting as all this is, I leave comparing and contrasting these facets as an exercise for the reader!
#1 BigFive-Test.com
And the #1 best Big Five “OCEAN” Free Online Questionnaire I found is the Big Five Personality Test at bigfive-test.com!
I like this one best because it is very nicely styled and has a very responsive, modern feel. I did all of these on my computer, but am sure you would be fine doing this one on your phone. That is definitely not true of some of these others, some of which are, as I mentioned pretty “old school!”
It has a nice, Goldilocks-y 120 questions — not too many, not too few — and gives the results in very colorful, beautiful graphs. Yes that is “graphs” with an “s,” because like the best of the other top sites it includes a graph of the facets for each of the Big Five Factors.
Finally, it has buttons allowing you to post your results to Facebook and Twitter. Who knows, maybe if you post your results, one of your friends will take the test, and you will finally and completely understand each other and become best friends for life!?! Hey, it’s worth a try. Seems to me you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Move Along, No Questionnaires Here
To complete this list I need to mention the International Personality Item Pool or IPIP one last time. Rather than containing tests, it has a spreadsheet containing the items used on a wide variety of tests.
It’s very scientific and its home page contains the following caveat:
For persons wandering into this site who have not completed a university course or two in psychological assessment, BEWARE: This site includes highly technical scientific information, and NO PERSONALITY TESTS ARE ADMINISTERED HERE.
The site may not be very friendly, but for someone like me, it is a gold mine.
If you are really interested in personality questionnaires, and maybe considering hosting your own site with one or more of them, this is the site for you!
Thanks for reading my listicle, and consider checking out my other articles about the Big Five “OCEAN” traits, coming to medium.com very soon!
