Take This Quick Personality Test

The Ten-Item Personality Inventory is a fast measure of the Big Five.

Updated March 9, 2026 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

What kind of person are you? Are you passionate? Aloof? Worried? Diligent? Artsy? Dominant? Submissive? Shy ?

Personalities come in all shapes and sizes. And we all have traits that serve as the foundation for who we are and for how we uniquely approach the world.

In the past few decades, personality psychologists have found converging evidence suggesting that one’s basic personality can be boiled down to five broad trait dimensions. These Big Five traits (see McCrae and Costa, 1985) are as follows:

Each of these traits is considered a continuous dimension, with people scoring somewhere on the continuum between the two extreme forms of each trait.

The Ten-Item Personality Inventory

Several measures of the Big Five personality traits have been developed over the years. In the research that my students and I conduct as part of the work of the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab , we tend to use a very brief measure called the Ten-Item Personality Inventory, TIPI , developed by Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann (2003).

Completing this inventory takes less than a minute. Research on the psychometrics of this measure has demonstrated its validity of this measure in multiple studies. In short, it is very efficient and valid. We like it!

While more in-depth tests of the Big Five traits provide a finer-tuned summary of one’s basic personality structure, the TIPI can actually provide someone with a quick snapshot of where they score on each of the five basic personality attributes.

Adapted from Sam Gosling’s website at the University of Texas , the test, along with scoring procedures, is found below:

1 Here are several personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other.

1 = Disagree strongly

2 = Disagree moderately

3 = Disagree a little

4 = Neither agree nor disagree

_____ Extraverted, enthusiastic.
_____ Critical, quarrelsome.
_____ Dependable, self-disciplined.
_____ Anxious, easily upset.
_____ Open to new experiences, complex.
_____ Reserved, quiet.
_____ Sympathetic, warm.
_____ Disorganized, careless.
_____ Calm, emotionally stable.
_____ Conventional, uncreative.

Scoring for the TIPI is as follows:

Recode the reverse-scored items (that is, recode a 7 with a 1, a 6 with a 2, a 5 with a 3, and so on). The reverse-scored items are numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10.
Take the average of the two items (the standard item and the recoded, reverse-scored item) that make up each scale.

TIPI scale scoring (“R” denotes reverse-scored items): Extraversion: 1, 6R; Agreeableness: 2R, 7; Conscientiousness; 3, 8R; Emotional Stability: 4R, 9; Openness to Experiences: 5, 10R.

Example using the Extraversion scale: A participant has scores of 5 on item 1 (extraverted, enthusiastic) and 2 on item 6 (reserved, quiet). First, recode the reverse-scored item (i.e., item 6), replacing the 2 with a 6. Second, take the average of the score for item 1 and the (recoded) score for item 6. So the TIPI Extraversion scale score would be: (5 + 6)/2 = 5.5 1

What Do My Scores Mean?

Personality traits are often conceptualized in a relativistic manner. That is, scores are usually thought about relative to how others have scored.

In their 2003 paper, Gosling et al. provided information on the means (averages) and standard deviations (SDs)* for each of these five measures (on a sample of 1,813 adults). These results are as follows:

Mean: 4.44, SD = 1.45

Mean: 4.83, SD = 1.42

Mean: 5.38, SD = 1.07

Mean: 5.23, SD = 1.11

Mean: 5.40, SD = 1.32

Now you can compare your scores with the means. For dimensions where your score is below the mean, you’d be “low” on that dimension. For instance, you might have scored a 3 on extraversion, which would correspond to being below the mean of 4.44, thus making you somewhat of an introvert.

This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.