The 20-item short form of the Big Five. Four questions per domain, about three minutes.
20 questions across 5 scales, about 3 minutes|Published scoring key from Mini-IPIP, 20 items, not invented
Authors: Donnellan, Oswald, Baird & Lucas (2006)
Licence: Public domain IPIP items, free to use without permission
How much stimulation and social contact you seek out, and how much energy you get back from it.
High. You start conversations, you're comfortable being noticed, and a busy room tends to charge you rather than drain you. Decisions get made out loud, often while you're still thinking.
Low. You rebuild your energy alone. Groups are manageable but they cost something, and you'd usually rather have one real conversation than six brief ones. Thinking happens before speaking, not during.
Whether your default stance toward other people is cooperative and trusting, or sceptical and competitive.
High. You assume good intent, you notice when someone is struggling, and you'd rather absorb a cost yourself than create a conflict. People tell you things.
Low. You judge claims on evidence rather than on who made them, and you're comfortable holding a position that makes a room uncomfortable. You negotiate for your own side without flinching.
How much you plan, organise and follow through rather than improvise. Of the five, this is the strongest predictor of performance at work and in study.
High. You have a system and you trust it. Deadlines are real to you, you finish what you start, and you'd rather be early than clever.
Low. You work in bursts and you'd rather keep options open than commit to a sequence. Structure feels like a cost, and you make up ground through speed rather than through planning.
How strongly and how often you experience negative emotion, and how long it takes to return to baseline. The inverse of emotional stability.
High. You feel things at full volume and difficult situations stay with you after they're over. You tend to see what could go wrong before anyone else does.
Low. Stress runs off you. You recover quickly after something goes badly, and pressure doesn't change your judgement much.
Appetite for ideas, novelty, art and abstraction. Often confused with intelligence, though it measures whether you enjoy thinking, not how well you do it.
High. Unfamiliar ideas attract you rather than unsettle you. You'd rather have a new problem than a solved one, and you notice aesthetic detail other people walk past.
Low. You back what is proven, concrete and already working. Theory for its own sake doesn't hold you; results do.
Question 1 of 20
How accurately does this describe you?
Am the life of the party.
Short forms exist because long ones do not get finished. When a questionnaire sits inside a larger study, or has to be repeated weekly, fifty items per construct is a budget nobody has. Donnellan, Oswald, Baird and Lucas built the Mini-IPIP in 2006 to solve exactly that: four items per Big Five domain, selected from Goldberg's 50-item IPIP markers, and then validated across five separate samples.
The result is not a watered-down version of a proprietary test. It is a deliberately short measure with published psychometrics, which is a different and more honest thing.
20 answers
Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.
5 scales
Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.
A band
Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.
Four items per domain on a five-point accuracy scale, reverse-keyed items flipped before summing. Raw scores run from 4 to 20 per domain; the bar shows the position inside that range.
Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.
The alphas reported on ipip.ori.org are .77 for Extraversion, .70 for Agreeableness, .69 for Conscientiousness, .68 for Neuroticism and .65 for Intellect/Imagination. For four-item scales those are respectable; they are also clearly lower than the 50-item form, and you should expect a noisier estimate.
In practice that means treating anything near the midpoint as unresolved. If a domain here comes back at 48 or 55 out of 100, the honest reading is that the Mini-IPIP could not separate you on that trait, and the 50-item version will tell you more than taking this one again would.
One note on labelling: the IPIP site points out that the Mini-IPIP authors scored the fourth factor as Neuroticism while describing it as a Five-Factor Model measure, when the items come from the lexical Big Five. The items and the key are unaffected; the naming is just looser than it looks.
Worth taking if
Not the right tool for
Four items per domain is a deliberately noisy estimate. Treat differences of a few points as nothing.
Reliability is lower than the 50-item form, particularly for Intellect/Imagination (alpha around .65 in the original paper).
Like any self-report, it measures self-description rather than behaviour.
This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.
20 questions, about 3 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.
No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from Mini-IPIP, 20 items, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.
Same five traits and the same source pool, but four items per trait instead of ten. It takes about three minutes rather than ten, and the estimate is correspondingly rougher.
For a broad picture, yes. For splitting hairs, no. The published alphas run from .65 to .77, which is adequate for describing where you sit but not for distinguishing between two scores a few points apart.
About three minutes. It is the shortest personality assessment here.
Yes, and there is no account. The items are public-domain IPIP items and the scoring key is linked on this page.
Take this one if you are short on time or want to measure repeatedly. Take the IPIP-50 if this is the only personality test you are going to do.
Item text and + / - keying read directly from the Mini-IPIP scoring key on ipip.ori.org. Check the source.