Agreeableness · Facet A5
Modesty is the part of Agreeableness that decides how readily you place yourself above other people. It says little about what you have done and a lot about whether you say it out loud. High scorers keep their standing out of the conversation. Low scorers name it without embarrassment.
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Modesty measures how comfortable you are with the idea that you are better than the people around you. The statements deal with seeing yourself as superior, deserving more attention, enjoying the role of the important person in the room. None of them asks what you have achieved, so two people with identical records can sit at opposite ends of the scale.
The facet belongs to Agreeableness more loosely than any facet in the test belongs to its own domain. Its correlation with the other five parts combined is 0.26, the lowest of all thirty, and against the sisters one by one it averages 0.20. With Trust it is essentially zero. Warmth towards people and quietness about yourself are separate questions.
The score describes a settled habit rather than a mood. How you handle your own standing looks much the same at twenty and at sixty, and our norms show less movement here across a lifetime than in almost any other facet. It says nothing about the day you either spoke up or did not.
In the research literature the scale keeps the name Modesty, and the neighbouring construct in the six factor HEXACO model appears as Honesty-Humility. Our statements come from the public domain set published by Johnson rather than from any commercial inventory.
Everyday speech files three different things under this word. The numbers pull them apart, and the difference decides how your own score should be read.
Believing you are no better than other people is not the same as thinking poorly of yourself. The two do share ground: modesty runs 0.35 with Depression and minus 0.32 with Self-Efficacy, the sense that you can handle what you take on. Both links are real and small, leaving around nine tenths of each scale unexplained.
Self-consciousness is discomfort at being watched. Modesty is not making claims about your rank. They are the closest pair modesty has outside its own family at 0.46, and they still come apart: someone entirely at ease in front of a full room can spend the evening never mentioning what they built.
The strongest link modesty has anywhere in the model runs to assertiveness at minus 0.57, the fifth most opposed pair among all 435. That is a lot of shared ground and still only about a third of each scale. Pushing a plan through and claiming to be the better person are separate acts, and only the second is counted here.
One end is not good manners and the other is not arrogance. Both are ordinary ways of handling attention, and each of them sends a bill somewhere.
You would rather the work talked than you did. Credit goes to whoever else was in the room, comparisons make you restless, and you go quiet when people start ranking themselves aloud. The bill arrives wherever volume is the currency: pay reviews and hiring tend to count whoever spoke first.
You instinctively downplay your achievements and pass the credit along. It is a lovely trait that has one tax: being overlooked by people who only hear volume.
You can name what you are good at without a run up, in the flat voice other people keep for the weather. Nobody has to guess what you bring, and your part of a project gets counted. The price appears when a listener hears a claim about worth in what was, to you, a plain fact about a skill.
You claim your space and your credit without embarrassment. Self-promotion is simply accurate reporting in your view, and it serves your work well.
Four people in ten land in the middle band, and it is the least dramatic place to be. A strength gets named when it is relevant and dropped once it has landed. That is not a compromise between two better options, it is the ordinary setting for a question that only shows at the ends.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile split used by Johnson, and none of them is a judgement about character. The scale reads how a person describes their own standing, so it cannot tell whether the modesty is private or performed.
Ten answers scored 1 to 5 make a raw score between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 completed profiles of the full version.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 22 |
| 25 | 27 |
| 50 | 31 |
| 75 | 36 |
| 90 | 40 |
Half of all profiles fall between 27 and 36 points, and 31 points stands at the 51st percentile overall. The same 31 is the 59th percentile for a man and the 46th for a woman, because a percentile compares you with people of your own sex and age who took this test.
Group averages differ, and the age line here does something the rest of Agreeableness does not.
Women average 31.7 points here and men 29.4, a gap of about 2 points across a 40 point range. Age is the surprise. Modesty barely moves across a lifetime, from 29.8 to 30.1 in men and 31.7 to 32.4 in women, while Trust, Morality and Cooperation each climb three to five points. Only one facet in the test moves less. The oldest cell holds around 250 people per sex.
Agreeableness is six separate things reported as one number, and this one is the odd member. The figures show how far it stands from the rest and what it travels with instead.
At work the trait becomes visible the moment somebody has to say who did what. High scorers describe the project and skip their own part in it, which reads as easy to work with. Where budgets follow whoever spoke, the same habit quietly costs money. A low score reads as plain speaking, and risks a room that hears the claim louder than the work.
Between people the facet decides how comparisons feel. High scorers rarely turn a conversation into who is doing better, which is peaceful and can leave a partner unsure how much they mind about anything. Low scorers keep the score visible, which is easy to plan around and now and then lands as competition.
For growth the question is not volume but which rooms the habit runs in. The same person can name a skill to a friend without a thought and go silent about it in a review, and that gap between settings is the part worth looking at.
Twin studies put something near half of the differences between people on traits like this one down to inheritance, and most of the remainder to experiences brothers and sisters do not share. Modesty behaves like the rest of the model there. Where it parts company is the life course.
Agreeableness is known for rising with age, and in our norms Trust, Morality and Cooperation all do. Modesty stays put: from under 21 to past 60 it moves less than a point in either sex, and only Adventurousness moves less. What moves first is the setting, since a job that requires selling yourself changes the behaviour long before the disposition follows.
A single number cannot say what your modesty is doing next to the rest of you. High modesty beside high assertiveness reads nothing like high modesty beside low self-efficacy, and combinations are the level the paid analysis works at.
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The full version measures modesty with 10 statements, the short one with 4. Answers count 1 to 5, reverse worded statements are flipped before adding, and the total is a raw score that the norm table for your sex and age turns into a percentile. Six of the ten run in reverse here, and in the short version all four do: modesty is one of only four scales scored purely from disagreement.
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 are not printed here. People answer differently once they have seen the items, so they appear when the test starts and not before.
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Set the slider where you expect to land next to everyone else, then take the test and see what the norms make of the guess.
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.
No. Three people in ten land in the low band by the way the bands are drawn, and most of them are simply willing to say what they are good at. The scale counts that willingness, not contempt. What people mean by arrogance usually shows up as low scores across several parts of Agreeableness at once.
In everyday speech very little, and the literature uses both. Our scale asks a narrow question: how comfortable you are placing yourself above others when the subject comes up. The wider idea of humility, which covers what a person does unobserved, belongs to the Honesty-Humility factor of HEXACO.
Women in our sample average about 2 points more than men on a 40 point range, around the middle of the sex differences across the thirty facets. Reporting style and what each group learns to say about itself are both argued over as explanations. It is a difference between group averages, not a prediction about anyone.
Easily. The link between modesty and Self-Efficacy, the belief that you can handle what you take on, is minus 0.32, which leaves roughly nine tenths of one scale unaccounted for by the other. Quiet people certain of their competence are ordinary here, and so are loud people who are not.
Agreeableness is the domain and modesty is one of its six facets, the one that fits worst: its correlation with the rest of the domain is 0.26, the lowest figure of all thirty. A high score here often sits next to an average Agreeableness total, and warm people who talk freely about their strengths are common.
We measured alpha at 0.78 for the 10 statement version and 0.74 for the 4 statement one, on the open data published by Johnson. Both are sound, and both sit towards the lower end of the thirty facets, which is usual for scales built from a mix of situations rather than one narrow feeling.
About fifteen minutes for the short version and forty for the full one. Both report all 30 facets as percentiles, both are free, and neither asks you to sign up.
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