Agreeableness · Facet A6
Sympathy is the part of your temperament that decides how far other people's feelings steer your judgment. It is not about how much you help, and not about how well you read a room. It measures the pull: whether somebody else's trouble tilts the call you were about to make.
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Sympathy measures tender-mindedness: how readily another person's situation moves you, and how much that feeling weighs when you decide. The statements ask about being touched by need, making allowances for people in difficulty, and whether pity is a fair basis for a choice. The scale never asks whether you acted. It asks how loudly the feeling arrives.
The facet sits at the far edge of the domain, and its neighbours show why. Inside Agreeableness it travels closest with Altruism at 0.63. Outside it, the strongest link on the whole test is Emotionality at 0.43, a facet of Openness. A soft heart looks as much like openness to feeling as it looks like kindness.
Scores describe a setting, not a mood. Anyone standing next to real suffering is moved by it, whatever their temperament. This facet describes where you return on a normal day, when the bad news belongs to somebody else and nothing is being asked of you.
In the research literature the same scale usually carries the name Tender-Mindedness, and older work calls the territory a humane orientation. The item wording here comes from the public domain pool published by Johnson.
Three neighbouring ideas end up under the same word, and each one changes what a score means.
Empathy is accuracy: reading what another person feels and getting it roughly right. Sympathy is movement: being pulled by it. The two come apart both ways. A negotiator can read a room precisely and stay unmoved, and somebody moved by every sad story can still misjudge which one was sad.
Altruism is what leaves your hands: time, help, money. Sympathy is what happens in your chest before any of that. They are the closest pair in the domain at 0.63 and they still separate: some people are moved constantly and give little, and steady givers often call themselves unsentimental.
Being moved says nothing about whether you can hold a line. In our data the facet has almost no relationship with Assertiveness, close to zero at -0.07. What it travels with is a readiness to make allowances, 0.44 with Cooperation, and that is a different thing from being unable to say no.
Neither end is the nicer personality. One feels first, the other weighs first, and both of them end up looking after people.
Somebody else's difficulty arrives as sensation rather than information, and by the time you are deciding it is already in the room. People bring you the part of a story they would not tell anyone else, because they can see it registers. The bill comes when the fair answer and the kind answer point different ways.
Other people’s pain lands in your own chest. You are moved to respond, not just to notice, and the world is warmer around you because of it.
You notice that somebody is having a bad month and it does not move the ruler. Decisions run on rules, consequences and what was agreed, which is why unpopular calls land on your desk and stay there. The cost is distance: steadiness reads as indifference, and now and then the rule in front of you is the wrong one.
You judge with your head first: principles, fairness, consequences. Hard decisions cost you less, which makes you valuable exactly where they must be made.
Around four profiles in ten land in the middle band, and it is a sound place to stand. The feeling arrives, gets heard, then argues its case alongside the rest of the decision: moved, and still able to say the hard thing on a day when the hard thing is true.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile convention used by Johnson. A low score is not coldness and a high one is not virtue: the scale notes which signal reaches a decision first, not the worth of the person deciding.
Ten answers add up to a raw score between 10 and 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 finished profiles, and it is worth reading with the sexes in mind: they sit almost three points apart.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 27 |
| 25 | 31 |
| 50 | 36 |
| 75 | 40 |
| 90 | 44 |
Half of all profiles fall between 30 and 39 points and the combined median is 35. That number hides the split: a raw 35 is the 59th percentile for a man and the 41st for a woman. A percentile compares you with people of your own sex and age who took this test, not with everybody.
Group averages move further apart here than on most facets of this domain, and they still describe groups.
Women average 36.1 points and men 33.2, a gap of 2.9 on a 40 point range and the biggest of the six facets of Agreeableness. Both curves rise slowly with age: men from 32.8 under 21 to 34.9 past 60, women from 35.5 to 37.8. The oldest cell holds about 250 people per sex, the same small group behind every facet, so read that end as a hint.
Agreeableness is six separate habits and this one is the outlier. It sits nearest to Altruism at 0.63, the firmest pair the domain has, while its strongest outside link is Emotionality at 0.43, the best bridge between Agreeableness and Openness in the test. Its most negative link anywhere is only -0.16, with Anger.
At work this is the person who notices that the quiet colleague has gone quieter, and who hears the circumstances behind a missed deadline before the excuse. A team leans on that more than it admits. The cost lands in decisions that go against somebody: a high scorer holds those for days and can soften a message until it is gone. A low scorer delivers the same news cleanly, sometimes to a person who needed acknowledgement first.
Close relationships are where the trait is most visible and most often misread. High scorers move with the state of the person in front of them, which reads as warmth, and on a hard week as losing their footing inside somebody else's crisis. Low scorers stay level while you are not and answer the question you asked, sometimes missing that the question was not the point.
The useful direction is not more feeling or less of it. At the high end the work is a pause: let the pull arrive, then check it against what was agreed before answering, which keeps the warmth and removes most of the regret. At the low end the gain is smaller and cheaper: saying out loud the sentence the other person needed to hear.
Twin studies put roughly half of the spread on Big Five traits down to genetics, and most of the rest to experiences siblings do not share rather than to the home they grew up in. That leaves real room for movement, but slow room: rank order holds across a decade, and change arrives as drift.
The population trend here runs gently upward: older groups score about two points higher than younger ones, part of the pattern of people growing warmer and steadier through adulthood. The norms compare different people at different ages rather than following anyone across a life, so read the slope as a tendency.
One number cannot tell you what your particular combination does. High Sympathy next to high Assertiveness behaves nothing like high Sympathy next to low Assertiveness, and the second pattern is the one people describe as feeling used. That is the level the paid analysis works on.
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In the 300 item version Sympathy is measured by 10 statements, in the 120 item version by 4. Six of the ten are worded in reverse, more than most scales carry, a guard against people who agree with everything. Answers run from 1 to 5, reversed items are flipped, and the sum becomes the raw score behind your percentile.
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.
We do not print the statements here. People answer differently once they have seen the wording in advance, so the items appear only after the test starts.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Drag the pointer to the spot where you think you sit among other people, then let the test tell you how good the hunch was.
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.
Empathy is about accuracy: working out what another person feels. Sympathy is about being moved by it. A person can have plenty of one and little of the other, which is why psychologists keep them apart. This scale measures the second only.
No. It means the feeling does not get the first vote, not that it is missing. Low scorers stay useful in an emergency and say the true thing when everyone else is being nice. How much you actually help is a different scale, Altruism.
Women average 36.1 and men 33.2, a difference of 2.9 points and the biggest gap among the six facets of Agreeableness. Gaps of this size appear in most large samples, and reporting style, socialisation and biology all get proposed as reasons. It describes group averages and says nothing about an individual.
Higher than most, and most people already sit fairly high. The combined median is 35 out of 50, so a raw 35 puts a man at the 59th percentile and a woman at the 41st. The top band opens near 38 for men and near 40 for women.
Agreeableness is the domain, Sympathy one of its six facets. This facet correlates 0.59 with the other five combined, loose by the standards of the test: it is ordinary to score high here and land mid-band overall because trust or modesty sit lower.
We measured alpha at 0.79 for the 10 statement version and 0.73 for the 4 statement short one, on the open data published by Johnson. Both are usable and both sit low for this test: four of the five least consistent scales of the thirty are agreeableness facets.
Both versions score all 30 facets. The 300 item test gives each facet 10 statements, the 120 item one gives 4 and takes about a third of the time. No payment and no account: percentiles appear the moment you finish.
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