A Big Five score tells you where you land on five broad traits. It does not tell you how you got there — and two people with the same Extraversion score can be very different company.
This guide explains the thirty facets beneath the five traits, why they matter, and how our Big Five Facets test measures them with the public-domain IPIP-NEO-120.
The Big Five Facets test measures the five Big Five domains and the thirty narrower facets beneath them, six per domain, using the IPIP-NEO-120: a 120-item public-domain inventory developed by John A. Johnson from the International Personality Item Pool. Scores are reported as percentiles against a large online reference sample, optionally restricted to one sex and age band.
Six facets under each trait
The facet model comes from the NEO PI-R tradition: each of the five domains is split into six narrower traits. The IPIP names, which our test uses, are:
- ✦Neuroticism: Anxiety, Anger, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Immoderation, Vulnerability.
- ✦Extraversion: Friendliness, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity Level, Excitement-Seeking, Cheerfulness.
- ✦Openness: Imagination, Artistic Interests, Emotionality, Adventurousness, Intellect, Liberalism.
- ✦Agreeableness: Trust, Morality, Altruism, Cooperation, Modesty, Sympathy.
- ✦Conscientiousness: Self-Efficacy, Orderliness, Dutifulness, Achievement-Striving, Self-Discipline, Cautiousness.
Why the same score can mean different things
A domain score is an average of its facets, and averages hide things. One person reaches the 70th percentile for Extraversion by being warm and loving crowds; another gets there by taking charge and always being on the go, while being fairly reserved with strangers. Roles, relationships, and stress treat those two people very differently.
That is why the most useful part of a facet report is often the facet that runs against its own domain — a high Anxiety score inside an otherwise calm profile, say. The domain averages it away; the facet shows it.
How the test measures them
The IPIP-NEO-120 was developed by John A. Johnson and published in 2014. It uses four public-domain items per facet, chosen from the longer 300-item IPIP-NEO to keep each facet's content broad. Our items and scoring keys are copied verbatim from the author's item key.
Four items is not many. In the reference sample, facet reliabilities run from about .66 to .89, against .82 to .90 for the domains. So read a single facet as a lead, and trust patterns across several facets more than any one of them.
Who you are compared with
Johnson also published the anonymised answers of everyone who took the inventory online. The percentiles on our result come from the 339,977 adults among them who answered every item. Because that file records sex and age, you can compare yourself with all adults or only with your own sex and age band — which matters, because average scores differ: in this sample women score higher on Neuroticism than men, and Conscientiousness and Agreeableness rise with age.
It is a large, self-selected, mostly American online sample, not a representative population norm, and the result page says so next to every percentile.
One facet to read carefully
Liberalism's items ask about voting for liberal or conservative candidates and attitudes to crime — a US political frame. Outside that context it may say more about local politics than about personality, and our report says so rather than reading it as a trait.