Agreeableness · Facet A2
Morality is the Big Five facet that describes how straight you play with other people. It has little to do with right and wrong. It asks whether you get what you want by saying it plainly, or by shaping the impression first and letting the other side work out the rest.
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Morality in the IPIP-NEO measures straight dealing. The statements ask whether flattery is a normal way to get your way, whether you hand over a presentable reason while keeping the real one, and whether a useful half truth feels like an ordinary tool. A high score means the stated reason is the actual reason.
The English name misleads nearly everyone who meets it. Most research calls the same scale Straightforwardness, and that fits better: it covers candour in dealing with people, not conscience, not values, not conduct. Nothing here counts good deeds or catches wrongdoing.
The other end has its own competence. Reading the room, holding material back until it is worth spending, and shaping a request so that it can be accepted are the skills negotiation and diplomacy run on. The scale places you between playing it straight and playing it well.
Research papers usually call this scale Straightforwardness, and older writing on the same ground speaks of candour or sincerity. Our version uses the public domain IPIP items released by Johnson, with no commercial inventory involved.
Three different things share the word in English, and only one of them sits on this scale.
The score says nothing about your character. Someone at the top of this scale can be selfish in ways the items never ask about, and someone at the bottom can be scrupulous about promises, money and harm. The statements track one narrow habit: whether influence goes through the front door.
These two sit closer together than any other pair from different domains in our data, correlating 0.69 across 360 such pairs, and they still ask separate questions. Dutifulness is about obligations: does the agreed thing get done. Morality is about the channel you use with the person in front of you.
Saying what you mean is not the same as saying everything you think. This facet travels with Cooperation at 0.58 rather than against it, and its link with Assertiveness runs slightly negative at -0.21. High scorers are rarely the people who correct you in front of a room.
Neither end is the better person to deal with. Each one buys something and sends a bill for it.
You put your reason on the table and leave it there. People rarely have to decode you, and agreements get made quickly. The bill arrives in rooms where everyone else is holding something back: you open with your real number, you say the inconvenient thing early, and a position handed over plainly can be used against you.
You say what you mean, and games of influence feel foreign to you. People always know where they stand with you, which quietly becomes your reputation.
You think about how a thing will land before you say it, and you keep material in reserve until spending it is worth something. That is the working kit of negotiation and diplomacy, and it protects you where full disclosure is expensive. The bill lands later, when people who sense a second layer take longer to settle with you.
You are strategic about what you reveal and when. Negotiation feels natural to you, and you read the game behind polite words better than most.
Roughly four people in ten land in the middle band, and it works perfectly well. They are straight about what carries weight and diplomatic about the rest, so the truth usually arrives with its sharp edges filed off rather than not arriving at all.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile split used by Johnson, not any threshold for honesty. The scale describes one habit of dealing with people. It cannot check your conduct or tell whether anything you have said was true.
Ten answers are added together, so a raw score runs from 10 to 50. The curve below is built from 135,947 finished profiles of the full test, and it sits high on the scale: the overall average is 37.5 points.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 29 |
| 25 | 34 |
| 50 | 39 |
| 75 | 43 |
| 90 | 46 |
Half of the men fall between 32 and 41 points, half of the women between 36 and 44. The spread is narrow, so two points carry you far: 37 points puts a man at the 53rd percentile and a woman at the 35th. Percentiles compare you with your own sex and age group among the people who took this test.
The group averages differ, and both of them keep moving in the same direction as the years go by.
Women average 38.6 points and men 35.9, a gap of 2.75 on a 40 point range. That is the eighth largest sex difference among the thirty facets: real, and unremarkable. Age moves the scale further: men go from 34.8 under 21 to 38.7 past 60, women from 37.4 to 41.4, and the climb holds in every age group. Past 60 the sample thins to about 250 of each sex.
Agreeableness is six separate habits, and this one keeps unusual company. Its closest partner anywhere in the model is Dutifulness, which belongs to Conscientiousness: 0.69, the tightest link between any two facets of different domains in our data. Inside its own domain the nearest neighbour is Cooperation at 0.58.
At work the high end shows up as an estimate you can build on. If a deadline is impossible you hear it in the meeting, not in week six. The same colleague usually makes a poor case for their own promotion, since that case needs packaging they will not do. The low end works the room instead, framing the plan for whoever signs it off.
Close relationships live on a mixture of the two. High scorers are restful company because nothing is being managed: what was said is what was meant. The price is timing, since a frank sentence lands whether or not the evening suited it. Low scorers protect people with an edited version, which holds up until the editing is noticed.
For growth the question is not how to become more honest, since honesty is not quite what the items ask about. At the top the room to move is presentation: timing and wording are not manipulation. At the bottom it is scope, because the ear for other people that closes a deal will wear down bonds that were never negotiations.
How much of this is inherited? For Big Five traits in general, twin studies put roughly half of the differences between people down to genetics, and most of the rest down to experiences that even siblings do not share. That leaves real room to move, and the movement is slow: rank order barely shifts across a decade.
This scale drifts upward. Our norms show the climb in every age group of both sexes, which puts Morality in a small club: the four steepest risers among the thirty facets belong to Conscientiousness, and this one comes sixth. Because the data compare different people at different ages, the trend belongs to a population and not to a person.
What one number cannot tell you is what your candour does next to the rest of your profile. High Morality beside low Assertiveness behaves nothing like high Morality beside high Assertiveness. Combinations are what the paid analysis reads.
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The full version measures Morality with 10 statements and the short one with 4. Eight of the ten are written from the tactical side, more reverse worded items than any other facet in the test, and in the short version all four are. Answers run from 1 to 5, reversed items are flipped before the sum, and the sum becomes a percentile against the norms 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 themselves are not printed here. Seeing them in advance changes how people answer, and on a scale where most items describe the tempting move rather than the plain one, that effect is larger than usual.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Before the questionnaire says anything, put your own guess on the line below, then take the test and compare. The distance between the two is often the more interesting number.
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. The scale asks how you influence people, not whether you break rules. Low scorers describe themselves as willing to flatter, to keep information back and to present a request in its best light. None of that is lying, and a questionnaire has no way of catching anything that is.
There is no good score. The high end buys clarity and pays for it in negotiating room. The low end buys manoeuvre and pays for it in the time other people need before they settle with you. Both patterns run good lives, and the reading that matters comes from the whole profile.
They are the closest pair from two different domains anywhere in our data, correlating 0.69, and they still measure separate things. Dutifulness asks whether the obligations get met, Morality asks how you deal with the person in front of you. Both describe someone whose life does not run on quiet exceptions.
Women average 38.6 points and men 35.9, a difference of 2.75 on a 40 point range and the eighth largest sex gap of the thirty facets. It separates group averages, not two individuals. The causes are still argued over: reporting style, upbringing and role expectations all get proposed.
Easily, as with any self report. Eight of the ten statements describe the tempting move, so disagreeing with all of them produces a top score in about a minute. What that buys is a percentile describing the person you would like to be. Answer quickly, on your own, without editing.
We measured alpha at 0.79 for the 10 statement version and 0.75 for the 4 statement one, both computed on the open data published by Johnson. Usable but modest, and the pattern is domain wide: the agreeableness facets are the least internally consistent block in the test.
Thirty facets, one questionnaire: the long version asks 10 statements per facet and the short one asks 4. No sign-up, no payment, and the percentiles appear the moment you finish.
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