Character Strengths tests

The study of moral character had a rocky path through psychology. In the early twentieth century it drew interest from figures like Edward Thorndike, but influential psychologist Gordon Allport argued that the language of personality should fully replace that of "character" and "virtue," given their moral overtones, and much of the field followed his lead. The result, as McCullough and Snyder (2000) point out, was that twentieth-century psychology barely revisited classic strengths like wisdom, gratitude, or forgiveness, and had little to offer anyone looking for help grounded in them.

Positive psychology, driven by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson in the early 2000s, reversed that turn: instead of focusing only on what goes wrong, it proposed systematically studying what works well in people.

Six virtues, twenty-four strengths

In 2004, Peterson and Seligman published a classification of 24 character strengths grouped into six virtues, built by reviewing which morally valued behaviors showed up across philosophical and religious traditions as different as Chinese Confucianism and Taoism, South Asian Buddhism and Hinduism, Athenian philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The six virtues that recurred across all of them, which the authors read as a non-arbitrary, culturally unbiased foundation, were:

• Wisdom and knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective.
• Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality.
• Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence.
• Justice: citizenship (teamwork), fairness, leadership.
• Temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation.
• Transcendence: appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality.

Nobody scores equally high on all six: identifying your top strengths (your "signature strengths") helps you put them to more deliberate use.

How it's measured: from the VIA-IS to shorter self-report tools

Peterson and Seligman's original instrument, the VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), runs 240 questions and takes about an hour to complete; it's still available free through the VIA Institute on Character. For Spanish-speaking populations there's also the Inventario de Virtudes y Fortalezas (IVyF), developed by Alejandro Cosentino and Alejandro Castro Solano, a shorter version psychometrically validated on samples from Argentina. Our test is a popular-science, informational take inspired by this classification, considerably shorter than either instrument: it doesn't replace a professional psychological assessment or the original academic questionnaires.

Sources

• Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. American Psychological Association / Oxford University Press.
• Dahlsgaard, K., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Shared virtue: the convergence of valued human strengths across culture and history. Review of General Psychology.
• McCullough, M. E., & Snyder, C. R. (2000). Classical sources of human strength: revisiting an old home and building a new one. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
• Cosentino, A. C. (2010). Assessing human virtues and strengths in Spanish-speaking populations. Psicodebate, 10.
• Buckingham, M., & Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. Gallup Press.