Five broad traits tell you a lot about a person, but they blur distinctions people notice every day: someone can be warm without being the life of the party, or socially bold without being open about themselves. Raymond Cattell's model keeps those apart with sixteen narrower factors.
This guide explains the sixteen factors, what changes in a public-domain version, and how our 16 personality factors test places each one against a large reference group.
Cattell's sixteen personality factors are narrow traits such as warmth, dominance, rule-consciousness, vigilance, and abstractedness, found by factor-analysing descriptions of personality. This test administers the International Personality Item Pool's 163-item public-domain scales mirroring them, and places each factor as a percentile against 26,788 adults who answered the same items online. It is not the commercial 16PF.
The sixteen factors
Cattell found his factors by factor-analysing descriptions of personality, and labelled them with letters. Each runs between two ends, and neither end is the better one.
- ✦A Warmth, B Reasoning, C Emotional Stability, E Dominance.
- ✦F Liveliness, G Rule-Consciousness, H Social Boldness, I Sensitivity.
- ✦L Vigilance, M Abstractedness, N Privateness, O Apprehension.
- ✦Q1 Openness to Change, Q2 Self-Reliance, Q3 Perfectionism, Q4 Tension.
Narrower than the Big Five
Several of the sixteen travel together. In our test's reference group, Emotional Stability and Anxiety correlate −.76, and Gregariousness and Friendliness .63 — the kind of overlap that broad factors summarise. The sixteen keep the distinctions those summaries merge. If you want the broad picture first, the Big Five test takes about seven minutes.
Factor B is self-rated in public-domain versions
In the commercial 16PF, Factor B (Reasoning) is a short set of problems with right answers. The International Personality Item Pool's matching scale, Intellect, asks how bright you consider yourself, so it measures intellectual self-confidence. Across 41 studies, people's own estimates of their ability correlated about .33 with tested ability (Freund & Kasten, 2012). For reasoning itself, our reasoning test counts problems solved, without an IQ.
How our test measures it
The 16PF Fifth Edition is a commercial questionnaire with its own items, norms, and scoring. The International Personality Item Pool publishes public-domain scales written to cover the same sixteen factors — 163 statements, which the IPIP calls preliminary — and we administer those verbatim. It is not the 16PF: there are no sten scores, no impression-management scale, and no global factors.
Each factor is placed as a percentile against 26,788 adults who answered the same items online at the Open-Source Psychometrics Project. That is a large reference group of people who chose to take a test online, not a sample of the population, and every result says so. The free result shows your three most distinctive factors.