Extraversion · Facet E1
Friendliness is the warmth inside extraversion: how quickly you take to people and how openly you show it. It says nothing about how many people you want in the room. High scorers let strangers in within minutes, low scorers stay courteous and slightly distant until someone stops being a stranger.
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Friendliness in the Big Five measures the temperature of your contact with people. The statements ask how easily you make friends, how soon you are at ease with someone new, and how plainly you let them see that you like them. None of it depends on how much company you want.
The facet sits on the companionable side of Extraversion rather than the driving side, and that spot makes it the piece of the domain reaching furthest into Agreeableness. Of the 36 pairs joining a facet of one to a facet of the other, the two strongest are both this one: Altruism at 0.59 and Trust at 0.51.
A score describes a resting temperature, not manners. Almost anyone is warm at a family wedding and cool at a border crossing. The scale picks up the setting you fall back to when nothing in particular is being asked of you, and it holds across years.
In the research literature the scale generally carries the name Warmth, and older work on the same ground speaks of affiliation. The wording here comes from the public domain items published by Johnson.
Three nearby notions get mistaken for warmth, and every mix-up changes what a score means.
Warmth is a temperature, gregariousness is a headcount. The pair travels together more closely than any other in the test except Anxiety and Vulnerability, at 0.75, and still comes apart the familiar way: people warm one to one who want nothing to do with a full room. The averages differ too, 34.98 here against 30.62 there.
Liking people and doing things for them are separate moves. Altruism measures effort spent on others and sits in Agreeableness, while this facet measures how swiftly you warm to someone at all. They form the closest of the 36 pairs linking the two domains, at 0.59, which is why the words blur. The gap holds the unshowy volunteer who skips small talk.
A low score is reserve, not fear. Shyness belongs to Self-Consciousness (N4) in Neuroticism, where the feeling is wanting contact and dreading its first moment. The two pull against each other at minus 0.59, the fourth strongest negative link among all 435 pairs, and still describe different people: you can be at ease among strangers and see no reason to be warm yet.
The scale runs from open on sight to open on acquaintance, and both settings work. What changes is who gets the warmth first.
You like people before they have given you a reason to, and it shows on your face inside the first minute. That makes you easy to meet and the one a group sends over to greet a newcomer. The price is that warmth arrives ahead of judgement: the pleasant stranger and the person to keep at a distance get the same welcome.
People feel welcomed within minutes of meeting you. That easy warmth opens doors and builds loyalty faster than any technique could.
You meet people correctly and hold the warmth until it has somewhere to go. A new room gets an even, polite version of you, so it takes a while for anyone to notice how much you like them. Since the warmth is not automatic, whoever receives it can be sure it was meant. The price is the first hour, when reserve reads as coolness.
Your warmth is real but rationed. A few people get the inner circle; the rest meet a polite, cooler surface first.
Roughly four people in ten sit in the middle band, where warmth is normal without being immediate. New people meet an open version of you, and the fuller thing turns up a few conversations later.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile convention used by Johnson. The scale measures how quickly warmth appears, not how much you care: many low scorers are deeply attached to the few they let in.
The raw score adds up 10 answers, so it runs from 10 to 50. The chart beneath this line is drawn from 135,947 finished profiles and leans warm: an average of 34.98 beats every extraversion facet except Cheerfulness.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 24 |
| 25 | 30 |
| 50 | 36 |
| 75 | 41 |
| 90 | 46 |
Half of all profiles fall between 29 and 40 points, and the middle sits at 35 for men and 37 for women. A raw 35 is the 51st percentile for a man and the 43rd for a woman. Percentiles compare you with people of your sex and age who took this test, not with everyone alive.
The sex difference here is modest. The age pattern is what sets this facet apart from its own siblings.
Women average 35.66 points and men 34.05, a gap of 1.6 on a 40 point range. Age is the story here. Extraversion as a whole sinks to about 191 points past 60, from 208 in the youngest women and 201 in the youngest men, yet warmth does not follow: men go from 34.4 to 35.5, women from 36.0 to 37.2. Of the six facets it gains most with age, while Gregariousness loses 4 points and Excitement-Seeking loses 10.
Extraversion files one number for six traits, and warmth ties into more of the others than any of them. Inside the domain it sits closest to Gregariousness at 0.75, the tightest pair in the test after Anxiety and Vulnerability, then Cheerfulness at 0.64. Its strongest tie beyond the domain runs down to Self-Consciousness, minus 0.59.
At work a high score does part of the job before the work starts. Clients settle faster, new colleagues stop being new within a day, and information reaches you because people enjoy telling you things. The cost is that ease gets read as agreement. A low score reads as professional distance, which serves review and negotiation well.
Close relationships show the difference most plainly. High scorers make contact easy and keep a wide circle warm, though a partner may notice that the same welcome goes to everybody and want a version kept for them alone. Low scorers give a narrow, unmistakable warmth: the circle knows where it stands, while those outside can spend years assuming they were tolerated.
Growth here is seldom about becoming a warmer person. At the high end the work is putting a gap between liking someone and trusting them, because the score supplies none by itself. At the low end it is signalling: warmth that stays inside you does no work in the world, and one small visible habit helps more than a new temperament.
Behaviour genetic work on the Big Five keeps landing near an even split between inherited differences and the personal side of experience, the part brothers and sisters never had in common. So a score is not decided at birth, and it is not a setting you move this month either: rank order holds well across a decade, and what changes, changes slowly.
This scale climbs a little as people age, which is odd company in its own domain. Both sexes gain about a point from the youngest group to the oldest, while gregariousness and the appetite for excitement fall away underneath. People seem to keep the liking and let go of the crowd. Different people are compared at different ages here, so take the line as a group pattern rather than a forecast.
What one number cannot show is how your warmth behaves next to the rest of you. High Friendliness under high Assertiveness runs a room nothing like high Friendliness under low Trust. That is the level the paid analysis works on.
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The 300 item version measures Friendliness with 10 statements, the 120 item version with 4. Five of the ten are worded the other way round, so agreeing with them pushes the score down. Answers run from 1 to 5, reversed items are flipped, and the sum from 10 to 50 becomes a percentile in 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 are deliberately not printed here. People answer differently once they can see what a scale is looking for, so the items appear only after a test starts.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Drag the marker to the spot where you think your warmth belongs among other people, then take the test and compare the two.
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.
Extraversion is the domain, Friendliness one of its six facets. The facet correlates 0.83 with the domain and 0.73 with the domain once its own contribution is removed, so they move together without being interchangeable. A reserved person who is active, cheerful and content to lead can still land in the average band.
It occurs, and the combination is real enough to be worth a look. The two scales run against each other at minus 0.59, so it is not the common case. Shyness is dread around the first move, this facet is warmth once contact exists, and someone who finds openings agonising can be warm the moment a conversation runs.
Women average 35.66 and men 34.05, a difference of 1.6 points on a 40 point range, far smaller than the spread inside either sex. With Cheerfulness this facet carries most of the modest sex difference in extraversion overall. It describes group averages and predicts nothing about two particular people.
Not in this data, which is the surprise of the page. Extraversion overall drops by about 9 points in men and 16 in women between the youngest and oldest groups, mostly through gregariousness and excitement seeking, while friendliness climbs about a point in both sexes. The oldest group holds around 250 people per sex, so treat that end as thin evidence.
We measured alpha at 0.890 for the 10 statement version and 0.815 for the 4 statement one, on the open data published by Johnson. That puts it level with Gregariousness at the top of extraversion and inside the best four of all 30 facets. The short form trades a little precision for speed.
The full test puts ten statements behind every facet and the short one four. Both are free, and your percentile for warmth is waiting at the end.
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