Extraversion · Facet E5
Excitement-Seeking is the size of the dose it takes to make a day feel alive. Not courage, not recklessness: how much noise, speed and novelty your system asks for before an ordinary afternoon registers as interesting. High scorers hunt for that dose, low scorers get theirs from a quiet room.
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Excitement-Seeking measures how strong a stimulus has to be before it does anything for you. The statements circle around noise, speed, crowds, bright places and the pull of doing something risky for the feeling of it. Nothing asks whether you act on the pull. It measures the appetite, not the meal.
The facet sits inside Extraversion, next to warmth, company and drive, and it fits that family loosely: it correlates 0.48 with the rest of its own domain, so a very sociable person can want nothing louder than a long dinner. Its firmest number is not a sibling. With Cautiousness, over in Conscientiousness, it sits at minus 0.57.
A score describes a set point rather than a season. Anyone tires of the same corridor after a month, and anyone has had enough by the end of a loud week. The scale captures the level the appetite returns to, and that level is the one thing here that shifts over a lifetime.
In the research literature the same territory is usually called sensation seeking, after Zuckerman. Our items are the public domain IPIP set published by Johnson.
The word thrill drags three other ideas behind it, and each changes what a high score means.
Zuckerman's sensation seeking is the older and wider construct: thrill and adventure, the hunt for novelty, disinhibition and how badly a person tolerates boredom. This facet takes the core of that and puts it on a Big Five map, so the two overlap heavily without being interchangeable.
Both scales like the unfamiliar, and they travel together at 0.43, but they want different things from it. Adventurousness belongs to Openness: strange food, a new city, an unfamiliar idea. This one asks about intensity, meaning volume, speed and physical risk. Somebody can jump out of aircraft and still order the same dish for years.
This is the assumption our data punish hardest. Wanting a strong sensation and being unable to hold off from one run on separate systems: here the two correlate 0.24, and the tie to Self-Discipline is minus 0.07. A dangerous climb can be planned for a year with complete control.
Neither setting is the healthy one. What separates them is the size of the dose, and each size brings something of its own to manage.
Bright, fast and loud registers with you the way ordinary registers with everyone else, so you go looking for it. You propose the trip nobody planned, take the assignment with the drama in it, keep a room awake past midnight. The bill arrives as boredom, and here boredom is a real cost rather than a mood.
You crave intensity: speed, noise, risk, new sensations. Boredom is genuinely painful for you, and that hunger needs feeding on purpose or it feeds itself.
You get the full return from things that would not move the needle for a thrill seeker: a known trail, a long meal, a book finished properly. Nothing has to be turned up for a day to count, which makes you steady company. The cost shows at the edges: the trip worth its discomfort gets declined.
You take your pleasures calm and deep: a long dinner, a familiar trail, a finished book. Adrenaline is a spice you rarely order.
Around four profiles in ten land in the middle band, where the appetite is real and answerable. A concert, a fast road or an unplanned weekend does its work, and then a quiet fortnight is welcome rather than empty.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile convention used by Johnson. A high score is a preference for intensity, not a verdict on anyone’s judgement, and nothing here says that acting on the appetite is a good idea in any given case.
Ten answers add up to a raw score between 10 and 50. The curve underneath comes from 135,947 finished profiles of the long version, and it is worth reading by sex: the two curves do not sit on top of each other.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 23 |
| 25 | 28 |
| 50 | 34 |
| 75 | 39 |
| 90 | 44 |
Half the men fall between 29 and 40 points and half the women between 27 and 39, with medians of 34 and 33. A percentile compares you against people of your own sex and age who took this test, a sample that chose to answer a questionnaire online.
One number here is larger than anything comparable on the other twenty-nine facet pages, and it belongs to age.
Between the under 21 group and the over 60 group this scale falls about 10 points: men from 35.4 to 26.1, women from 34.8 to 23.7. No other facet moves even half as far; the next steepest, Depression, shifts 4.2. Extraversion as a whole loses roughly 13 points over that span, so this facet carries most of it. Men average 33.5 against 32.2, one of six facets where men come out higher.
Extraversion reports one number for six different appetites, and this is the one that agrees with the rest least. Inside the family it keeps company with Gregariousness at 0.54 and Cheerfulness at 0.40, while its firmest tie points outside the domain.
At work a high score shows up as appetite for the messy assignment: the launch, the incident, the account nobody volunteers for. Those jobs get done well by somebody who is not spending energy staying interested. The bill lands on the maintenance half of a role, the audits and the second year of a stable project, where attention quietly drains away.
In close relationships the difference surfaces around weekends and holidays rather than anywhere deeper. High scorers propose the trip, book the loud thing and want company for it, which is generous and occasionally exhausting for somebody who had a slow Saturday in mind. Low scorers offer a settled rhythm, and can read restlessness as a complaint about them.
For growth the honest target is not wanting less. In the short run this appetite is among the more stubborn things on the page, and over decades it drops on its own. What can be chosen is the channel: whether the pull gets spent on something that leaves a mark or on something that merely fills an evening. At the low end the useful move runs the other way.
Differences of this kind are roughly half inherited, and most of the remainder traces back to experiences siblings never shared. That is the ordinary finding across Big Five traits, and it leaves real room to move. What sets this scale apart is that the movement is not hypothetical: it arrives for nearly everybody.
The slope is steep and it points down. Our norms put the under 21 group about 10 points above the over 60 group, the largest age difference of any facet in the test, matching the pattern researchers call maturation: the appetite for intensity cools while conscientiousness climbs. These are different people compared at different ages.
What one number hides is the company it keeps. High Excitement-Seeking next to high Cautiousness produces a careful planner of dangerous things; the same score next to low Cautiousness produces something else. Combinations are what the paid analysis reads.
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The long version measures this facet with 10 statements and the short one with 4. Answers run from 1 to 5, reverse worded items are flipped before the sum, and the total between 10 and 50 goes into the norm table for your sex and age, which returns a percentile. Alpha is 0.85 on 10 statements and 0.74 on 4, so shortening costs more precision than usual.
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. Reading the items of a scale before answering changes the answers, so they appear only once a test is running.
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Most people misjudge this one, usually in a predictable direction. Move the slider to where you think you stand, then take the test and see which way you were wrong.
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, and the numbers are blunt about it. Wanting intensity and failing to hold back are separate scales: this facet and Impulsiveness correlate 0.24, and with Self-Discipline the figure is minus 0.07. The score describes what you find rewarding, not what you do about it.
Because this is the facet age moves most. Our norms put the under 21 group near 35 points and the over 60 group near 25, while the next steepest scale in the test moves 4.2. The usual reading is maturation, helped along by circumstances and health. Different people were measured at different ages, so it is a tendency, not a forecast.
Nearly, and the overlap is deliberate. Sensation seeking is Zuckerman’s older construct and covers more ground: thrill and adventure, novelty, disinhibition and susceptibility to boredom. The Big Five facet takes the core of it and places it inside Extraversion.
In our sample men average 33.5 and women 32.2, a gap of 1.3 points on a 40 point range. It is one of only six facets among the thirty where men come out higher, and the only one inside Extraversion, where women lead on the remaining five. The gap describes group averages, not any two people.
Extraversion is the domain and this is one of its six facets. It correlates 0.66 with the domain, and 0.48 once the facet itself is removed, the second loosest fit in the family after Activity Level. A high extraversion score therefore says little about how much thrill somebody wants.
It is usable and noticeably weaker here. We measured alpha at 0.847 for the 10 statement version and 0.737 for the 4 statement one, on the open data published by Johnson. A drop of 0.11 is among the larger ones in the test, so the long version is worth the time.
The long version measures all thirty facets, the short one covers the same map with fewer statements. Both are free, and the percentile for this scale arrives with your results.
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