What Is the Big Five Test and What Is It For?

The Big Five test is a questionnaire that measures personality along the five dimensions of the Big Five model: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. There’s no single official test: there are professional versions such as the NEO-PI-R, research versions such as the BFI-2, and public-domain versions such as those from the IPIP.

This article answers the practical question: what it’s for, and how accurately it predicts things that matter. If you’re looking for what personality is according to this model and how its instruments are built, see what Big Five personality is.

The information in this article is educational and is no substitute for an assessment by a qualified professional.

How the test works

Measurement always follows the same principle: personality is a matter of degree. Nobody is purely extraverted or introverted; each person sits somewhere between the two ends of each scale.

The process has four steps:

1. The person reads short statements about behaviors or preferences, such as “I worry about things that will probably never happen.”
2. They indicate how much they agree, usually on a scale from 1 to 5.
3. The answers for each trait are added up, reversing those for items worded in the opposite direction.
4. In professional instruments, the score is compared with norms from a reference population, to see whether it’s high or low relative to people of similar age, sex, or country.

What the Personaramic test is like

Our Big Five test follows that logic with a few differences worth knowing. It comes in three versions: quick (10 statements, two per trait), standard (50, ten per trait), and complete (120, twenty-four per trait, with a breakdown into six facets). Each answer scores from 1 to 5 and the scores are summed directly.

It doesn’t compare your result with population norms or include consistency-check scales, as professional instruments do. It’s an educational adaptation inspired by the model, not the official NEO-PI-R, and its result is a general guide, not a clinical measurement.

What it’s for: what it predicts, and how much

The reason the Big Five dominates research is that its scores predict real outcomes, albeit modestly. These are the best-established findings.

Job performance

Barrick and Mount (1991) published the benchmark meta-analysis. Their main finding was that conscientiousness predicts performance consistently across all the occupational groups they studied, from professionals to skilled workers. The other traits predicted only in specific jobs and with small effects: extraversion, for example, in sales and management.

In leadership, the meta-analysis by Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002), covering 73 samples, found that extraversion was the most consistent correlate (0.31), followed by conscientiousness (0.28) and openness (0.24). Together, the five traits reached a multiple correlation of 0.48 with leadership.

Academic achievement

Poropat’s (2009) meta-analysis found a similar pattern in the classroom: conscientiousness is the trait most strongly related to grades, and at university its weight is comparable to that of intelligence. Extraversion, by contrast, is barely related to them.

Health and longevity

Bogg and Roberts (2004) reviewed 194 studies and found that more conscientious people smoke and drink less, drive less riskily, and exercise more. Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, and Goldberg (2007) went a step further with longitudinal studies: the predictive power of personality for mortality, divorce, and occupational success was of the same order as that of socioeconomic status or cognitive ability.

Mental health and well-being

High neuroticism, together with low conscientiousness, appears in every diagnostic group of anxiety, depression, and substance use analyzed by Kotov and colleagues (2010). In the general population, extraversion and neuroticism are the traits most closely related to life satisfaction (Steel, Schmidt, and Shultz, 2008).

How it’s used in practice

In hiring

Organizations use these profiles to estimate how someone will handle their tasks, knowing that predictive value varies by trait and by job. There are two important limits. First, the correlations are modest: they help improve decisions across many candidates, not foretell the future of a single one. Second, in a hiring process people can polish their answers, especially on conscientiousness and emotional stability, as we explain in the criticisms of the Big Five.

It isn’t the only test used for this purpose: the Wartegg test, a drawing test, is still used in hiring in several countries, although its validity is far more disputed than the Big Five’s.

In clinical psychology

In a clinical setting, the Big Five works as context, not as a diagnosis. High neuroticism points to an emotional sensitivity worth keeping in mind when planning treatment, and the other traits shed light on how a person responds to social dynamics or problem solving. Psychological interventions themselves also produce measurable changes in traits, especially in emotional stability (Roberts et al., 2017).

In research and self-knowledge

The most widespread use is research: almost any study that needs to control for personality includes a short version of the Big Five. For self-knowledge, its value lies in providing precise language for differences we all sense, without turning them into closed labels.

What the test doesn’t do

A Big Five test doesn’t diagnose disorders, doesn’t measure intelligence or values, and doesn’t tell you which career or partner suits you. It describes average tendencies in behavior and emotion that, across large groups, are associated with certain outcomes. Read that way, it’s the personality tool with the strongest backing in psychology today.

If you’d like to try it after reading this, here’s our Big Five test.

Sources

• Barrick, M. R. and Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1-26.
• Bogg, T. and Roberts, B. W. (2004). Conscientiousness and health-related behaviors: A meta-analysis of the leading behavioral contributors to mortality. Psychological Bulletin, 130(6), 887-919.
• Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R. and Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765-780.
• Kotov, R., Gamez, W., Schmidt, F. and Watson, D. (2010). Linking “big” personality traits to anxiety, depressive, and substance use disorders: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(5), 768-821.
• Poropat, A. E. (2009). A meta-analysis of the five-factor model of personality and academic performance. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 322-338.
• Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A. and Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The power of personality: The comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345.
• Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R. and Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117-141.
• Steel, P., Schmidt, J. and Shultz, J. (2008). Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 134(1), 138-161.