What this is for – and what it isn’t.

Appropriate uses

• Curiosity and self-reflection.
• A shared language for talking about how you and people you know differ.
• A starting point for thinking about fit – in work, study, or relationships – alongside everything else you know about yourself.

Uses we explicitly disclaim

• Clinical diagnosis. This does not assess or diagnose depression, anxiety, ADHD, personality disorders, or any condition. It is not a medical or psychological evaluation.
• Hiring or high-stakes selection. Using a brief self-report test to make decisions about people raises serious fairness and validity problems. Don’t.
• Legal, custody, academic, or financial decisions. Not built or validated for any of these.

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA/APA/NCME, 2014) are clear that a test is valid only for specific, evidenced uses. Ours is validated by its lineage for one thing: describing where you fall on well-studied traits, for your own understanding.

Limits to keep in mind

• Moderate individual prediction. Big Five traits predict life outcomes well in aggregate but only moderately for any one person.
• Self-report bias. We measure how you describe yourself, which isn’t always how you are.
• The Barnum effect. Some feedback will feel uncannily accurate partly because of a known cognitive bias, not just real signal – see the science page.
• Culture. The Big Five replicates best in WEIRD samples; norms carry their own cultural context.

On AI

Your scores are produced by transparent, deterministic arithmetic – not by an AI model. If we ever add an optional AI-scored, free-text feature, it will be clearly labelled, opt-in, and documented here, with its accuracy and biases disclosed.