Agreeableness · Facet A4
Cooperation is the part of your temperament that decides what happens when your interests and somebody else’s point different ways. High scorers give way early and would rather not have the argument. Low scorers hold the line and let the disagreement show. The scale measures the reflex, not who was right.
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Cooperation records what you do when two sets of interests will not both fit. The statements circle around arguing, giving offence and keeping score after a slight. Seven of the ten run against the trait, so a high score is built mostly out of friction that never happened.
The facet belongs to Agreeableness, the domain covering how you treat people, and no other scale in that family represents it as well: correlation with the remaining five taken together is 0.65, against 0.64 for Altruism and 0.26 for Modesty. Its nearest relative is Morality at 0.58.
A score describes a standing setting, not a day. Everyone yields to a hospital receptionist and everyone fights a wrongly issued fine. This scale catches the ordinary case, where nothing forces your hand, and that setting drifts upward across a life: our oldest groups sit four to five points above the youngest.
In research inventories the same ground is usually labelled compliance, and papers on the subject describe the far end of it as an antagonistic style. The ten statements here come from the public domain pool published by Johnson.
Each of these sits close enough to be mistaken for the scale, and each changes what a number means.
The firmest link this facet has outside its own domain is a negative one with Anger, minus 0.52, and no pair between agreeableness and neuroticism runs further apart. They remain two questions. Anger is how fast the heat arrives; this scale is what you do with a clash once it is there.
The nearest sister at 0.58, and the two get folded together as being nice. Morality is about playing straight: no flattery, no working around people. Cooperation is about not fighting. Someone blunt enough to tell you exactly where you stand scores high on the first and low on the second.
Giving way reads as having no spine, and the data will not support the swap. This scale overlaps with Assertiveness at only minus 0.30, while Modesty sits at minus 0.57 with it. Stating the plan and fighting over it are different jobs, often done by the same people.
Neither end is the better neighbour. One protects the relationship first, the other protects the position, and a working group needs both.
You find the version everyone can live with, and you find it early, usually before the other person has noticed there was anything to settle. Rooms loosen up around that. What it costs shows up later and quietly: people who never meet resistance stop checking whether you agreed or just went silent.
You smooth conflict before it ignites and find the shared interest under the argument. Watch one thing: agreement that costs you silence is not peace.
You say the thing that will have to be said eventually, and you say it while it is still small. Nobody guesses where you stand, and trouble that would have gone underground for months gets spent in ten awkward minutes. Not every hill was worth the climb.
Conflict does not scare you. You push back openly when you disagree, and people learn that your yes means yes because your no is real.
The middle band holds four profiles in ten, and it is the practical spot. Friction gets spent where the stakes justify it and skipped where they do not: bending on the schedule, holding firm on the substance.
Low, average and high split the sample 30/40/30, the convention Johnson uses for these norms. Neither end is a verdict on character: the scale registers how a collision of interests gets handled, not whether the person handling it was right.
Ten answers add up to a raw score between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 finished profiles of the long test, and the sexes lie closer together here than on four of the six facets in this domain.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 25 |
| 25 | 30 |
| 50 | 35 |
| 75 | 40 |
| 90 | 43 |
Half of all profiles fall between 30 and 39 points. A raw 34 comes out at the 52nd percentile for a man and the 41st for a woman, and the high band opens at 38 and 40. A percentile compares you with people of your own sex and age who took this test.
One of these two comparisons hardly moves anything. The other is among the steeper age effects on the test.
Women average 35.0 points and men 33.3, a gap of 1.7 on a 40 point range and the second narrowest of the six facets here, after Trust. Age does far more: men rise from 32.2 under 21 to 35.8 past 60, women from 33.9 to 38.6. That climb of 4.7 points in women is the steepest in this domain. The oldest cell holds around 250 people per sex.
Agreeableness is six habits rather than one, and this habit summarises the set better than any of the others: 0.65 with the remaining five taken together. Morality comes nearest of them at 0.58, then Altruism at 0.47. Outside the domain the firmest pull is Dutifulness at 0.44.
At work this is the difference between a decision that gets questioned and one that gets nodded through. High scorers keep meetings civil and swallow the small unfairnesses that cost more to raise than to carry, which makes them easy colleagues until the week something needed saying. Low scorers are why a bad plan dies in the room instead of in production.
Close relationships depend on this scale more than on anything else in the domain. High scorers keep the temperature low, and the risk builds out of sight: arrangements nobody checked, preferences never said aloud, a partner who learns three years late that the holidays were never wanted.
At the high end the target is not learning to fight. It is catching the moment a yes leaves your mouth ahead of the thought behind it, since that gap is where the accumulated bill comes from. At the low end the gain sits in timing: the objection is usually sound, and the same one an hour later in half the words costs nothing.
Behaviour genetic work on the Big Five keeps landing in the same neighbourhood: close to half of what separates people traces back to inherited differences, and most of the remainder to experiences brothers and sisters never share. That leaves genuine room to move, but the order people stand in barely reshuffles across a decade.
This scale is one of the movers. Agreeableness drifts upward through adult life, the pattern researchers call the maturity principle, and cooperation and morality carry most of that climb: three to five points between the youngest and the oldest groups, against roughly one on Altruism. The norms compare different people at different ages, so the slope is a tendency.
A single number cannot tell you what your combination does. High Cooperation beside high Assertiveness is a negotiator. The same score beside low Assertiveness is the person whose objection arrives by message, three days after the decision. Pairings are the level the paid analysis works on.
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The 300 item version measures Cooperation with 10 statements, the 120 item version with 4. Seven of the ten are worded against the trait, a count only Morality beats and only two other scales match, and in the short version all four are: agreeing with statement after statement lands you low here rather than high. Reversed answers are flipped back before the sum, which is read against the norm table for your sex and age.
Alpha shows how closely the statements of one scale agree with each other. In research, 0.70 and above is usually treated as solid. We counted these numbers on Johnson’s open data, so they can be checked against the published values.
The statements stay off this page on purpose. People answer differently once they have worked out what a scale is watching for, so the wording waits until the test starts.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Drag the marker to where you think you stand against other people, then answer the statements and see how far the guess was off. This scale sits near the middle of the thirty.
0 means lower than almost everyone who took the test, 100 means higher than almost everyone.
This is a guess, not a measurement. The test compares your answers with norms from real people.
Not on its own. The scale counts how readily you let a disagreement become visible, and visible disagreement is useful about as often as it is expensive. Low scorers hear about problems earlier and get fewer polite versions of the truth. What makes the trait costly is a low score next to a quick temper.
There is not one. A high score buys quiet and pays in things left unsaid. A low score buys clarity and pays in friction. The middle band, where four people in ten stand, is less a compromise than a switch: give way where it is cheap, hold where it is not.
Because the cheapest way to ask about not fighting is to ask about fighting. Seven of the ten point away from cooperation in the long version, and all four do in the short one, one of only four scales built that way. Agreeing with everything therefore pushes your score down here, not up.
Agreeableness is the domain, cooperation one of its six facets and the one closest to the whole: 0.65 with the remaining five together. They still separate, and somebody who gives way easily while trusting nobody ends up mid domain.
A little. Women average 35.0 points and men 33.3, a difference of 1.7 on a 40 point range and the second narrowest of the six facets in this domain. Numbers like that describe group averages and predict nothing about a person.
We measured alpha at 0.77 for the ten statement version and 0.71 for the four statement one, on the open data published by Johnson. Both are usable and both sit low for this test: of the thirty scales only Activity Level holds together less tightly.
The long test gives this facet 10 statements and does the same for the other twenty nine. The short one uses 4 apiece and takes a third of the time. Both are free, neither wants an account, and percentiles appear as soon as you finish.
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