What You Do and Why You Do It:

The Big Five Aspect Scale is a comprehensive, open-source 100-item personality measure, which is scored so that you will receive information about five major personality traits and their ten aspects (as detailed in the next section: What You Get, below). It will take you approximately 15 minutes to complete. You will be presented with a series of phrases, such as “carry out my plans,” “respect authority,” and “like to solve complex problems,” and asked to indicate your agreement or disagreement with those phrases as they apply to you, typically and personally. Make sure that you are not tired, or unhappy, or depressed, or hungry, or likely to be disturbed while you answer the questions, and that you are giving yourself enough time to consider your answers carefully. Your responses will be compared to those of 10000 other people, so that your personality can be assessed, in accordance with your similarity or difference to the average person. You will then be provided with a report that tells you how you rank, according to your self-report (which can be quite accurate) compared to others, in percentile terms. If you receive, for example, a percentile score of 85 for Extraversion, that means you are more extraverted (enthusiastic, assertive) than 85 out of 100 people. That makes you very happy and talkative, for example, compared to the average person.

If you would like to purchase the assessment for yourself, please click the "Buy Now" button below. If you would like to purchase the assessment for a friend, you can buy a voucher and email it to them, by clicking here.

What You Get:

The 100 question phrases that you will respond to are part of many open-source research projects, including those conducted in Dr. Peterson's lab, and can be found, along with similar question sets, elsewhere on the web. It is, however, the highly detailed, extensive results (unparalleled among available personality tests) as well as the large and representative comparison group that, in our opinion, make the understandmyself.com process uniquely accurate and comprehensive. After responding to the questions, you will receive a report comparing your response to those of 10000 others of diverse age, race and sex, so that you know exactly where you stand in relationship to others. You will receive information about your position along each of the Big Five dimensions of Extraversion (associated with positive emotion), Neuroticism (negative emotion), Agreeableness (the primary dimension of care for others), Conscientiousness (associated with duty, precision and responsibility) and Openness (interest in ideas and aesthetics), including customized descriptive paragraphs for your specific percentile positions. That five-dimensional description will be further expanded upon and developed for each of the ten aspects of the Big Five:

Enthusiasm (spontaneous joy and engagement) and Assertiveness (social dominance, often verbal in nature) for Extraversion.

Withdrawal (the tendency to avoid in the face of uncertainty) and Volatility (the tendency to become irritable and upset when things go wrong) for Neuroticism.

Compassion (the tendency to empathically experience the emotion of others) and Politeness (the proclivity to abide by interpersonal norms) for Agreeableness.

Industriousness (the ability to engage in sustained, goal-directed effort) and Orderliness (the tendency to schedule, organize and systematize) for Conscientiousness.

Openness (creativity and aesthetic sensitivity) and Intellect (interest in abstract concepts and ideas) for Openness to Experience.

This high-resolution description is one of the major advantages of our testing process and statistical procedures, and will provide you with a very detailed understanding of exactly who you are and how you are similar to and different from the other people around you. You might find it interesting to compare your report with that of the people you are close to: friends, intimate partners and family members. Doing so will help you understand why it is that you agree with some people, and disagree with others—even about fundamental truths. Personality differences, which are profoundly affected by basic biological factors, as well as lifetime experience, help determine such things as social behavior (loner vs socialite), political belief (highly open people are more liberal), work ethic (much stronger in conscientious people), interest in people vs things (agreeableness is associated with the former), and appreciation for art and literature (associated with openness). These differences are real, and can be very large. It is crucially important to understand yourself and other people so that you can better cope with the diversity of opinion and viewpoint that makes up the personal, familial and social world.

We wish you the best of luck with your self-exploration. We hope that the Big Five Aspect Scale illuminates your life, and helps you understand and appreciate those very different people that surround you and enrich the world with their unique differences of viewpoint and behavior.