Extraversion · Facet E2
Gregariousness is the part of extraversion that counts heads. It asks how much company you want, not how much you like the people in it. High scorers are fed by a full room and go looking for one. Low scorers keep the numbers small and reach a point where more people add nothing.
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Gregariousness in the Big Five measures appetite for company by the head. The statements ask whether a crowd lifts you or wears you down, whether you go looking for gatherings, and whether a busy place is where you would rather be. None of them ask whether you like people.
The facet sits at the centre of its domain in a way the other five do not. It runs at 0.86 with the whole extraversion score and 0.75 with the domain once its own share is taken out, both the highest in the family and third among 30 facets. Every tie it has of 0.5 or more sits inside extraversion.
A number here is a standing appetite, not a mood. Most of us want company after a quiet week and silence after a long party. The scale finds the level you come back to, and that level holds across years, if less firmly across a lifetime than most.
Papers on the Big Five label this scale Gregariousness, and earlier writing calls it sociability or the wish to affiliate. Our items come from the open IPIP pool that Goldberg assembled, in the edition Johnson issued.
Three neighbours stand so near that they swap places with this one, and each swap alters what a score means.
Warmth and numbers are different questions. Friendliness asks how fast you take to a person, this scale asks how many you want in the room. Only one of the 435 pairs in the test is tighter than these two at 0.75, and they still come apart both ways: the warm host who dreads the party, the regular at every gathering who lets nobody in.
This facet is the nearest thing the domain has to a stand-in, which is why it gets taken for the whole. It moves with the extraversion score at 0.86, more than any of its five siblings. But 0.86 leaves room: someone who runs meetings, keeps a fast pace and holds a sunny mood can sit above average on the domain and below it here.
The popular picture has extraverts charging in company and introverts draining. It fits the top of this scale and misses the bottom. The statements ask what you want, never what it costs. A person can come home worn out and have wanted every hour of it. Nothing here measures energy or skill with people.
The scale runs from wanting many people to wanting few, and neither end is the sociable one. What moves is the number at which company stops adding.
You go where the people are, and the more of them the better the evening works. Nothing has to be arranged for you; the volume itself is the point. The bill comes as thinness: many people known a little, few known well.
The more people, the more alive you feel. Group energy is fuel for you, and empty quiet weekends can feel like a power cut.
Company is good in small numbers and stops being good past a count. One talk you can follow beats a room you have to circle. None of this is dislike: the few who are there get more of you. The cost is the room you skipped.
Crowds spend your energy rather than create it. You do your best connecting in pairs and small tables, not banquet halls.
About four people in ten fall in the middle band, where a crowd is fine and finite. You go, you like it, and at some point the room turns into noise. Company here is a good part of life, not the fuel and not the toll.
Low, average and high follow the 30/40/30 percentile convention used by Johnson. The scale counts appetite for company, not skill with people and not how much you like them: warmth is measured separately, one facet along.
The raw score adds ten answers and runs 10 to 50. The curve below comes from 135,947 completed profiles and is the broadest in extraversion: a standard deviation of 8.78, third widest of all 30 facets.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 19 |
| 25 | 25 |
| 50 | 32 |
| 75 | 38 |
| 90 | 42 |
Half of all men sit between 24 and 37 raw points and half of all women between 25 and 38, with medians of 30 and 32. A raw 30 puts a man at the 50th percentile and a woman at the 43rd. Percentiles compare you with people of your sex and age who took this test.
The sex difference here is ordinary. The age line is not, and it is the reason for this page.
Women average 31.25 points and men 29.75, a gap of 1.5 on a 40 point range. Age does the real work: this is the third steepest decline in the test, behind Excitement-Seeking and Depression. Men go from 30.83 under 21 to 27.70 past 60, women from 32.89 to 27.91, so a sex gap of 2.1 points among the youngest closes to 0.2 among the oldest. The oldest cell holds about 250 people per sex.
Extraversion hands in one number for six appetites, and no other tracks the total as tightly. Inside the family it rides with Friendliness at 0.75, then Cheerfulness and Excitement-Seeking, both near 0.54. Outside the domain its firmest link is Self-Consciousness at minus 0.49, tenth from the bottom of all 435.
At work a high score turns the informal layer into an asset. You know people in three departments, and news gets to you before it is announced. The cost is the closed hour: work that needs one competes with a corridor full of company. A low score buys that hour back and pays in visibility, since the talk that hands out interesting work happens in the crowd.
Socially the difference shows in shape rather than in quality. A high scorer keeps a wide circle in motion, and the people closest to them can end up with a calendar full of names none of them can place. A low scorer runs a small circle with more hours in each friendship, and can be slow to spot that it has shrunk.
Development here is rarely about the appetite itself, which barely moves. At the high end the gain is depth: one standing arrangement with one person outlasts twenty loose ones through a busy season. At the low end it is exposure rather than sociability, since chances travel through people you barely know.
Twin and family studies put about half the variation in Big Five scales on what people inherit and most of the rest on the parts of life siblings never shared. That leaves the door open, though the room is not easy to move: rank holds up over ten years, and whatever shifts, shifts by degrees.
This scale is one of the few that visibly moves. It falls about 3 points in men and 5 in women between the youngest group and the oldest, the third largest age slide of the 30 facets, while warmth in the same domain rises by about a point. The appetite for numbers fades and the warmth does not. These are different people at different ages, not one person followed.
One number will not show what your appetite for company sits next to. A crowd-loving profile with low warmth runs a room nothing like the same appetite with high warmth. That is the level the paid report works on.
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The 300 item version measures Gregariousness with 10 statements and the 120 item version with 4. Five of the ten are written the other way round, so agreeing with them lowers the score instead of raising it. Answers run from 1 to 5, reversed items are flipped, and the sum becomes a percentile in the 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.
We do not print the statements here. People answer differently once they can see what a scale wants, so the items appear only after a test starts.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Drop the slider where your appetite for company feels right, then take the test and compare.
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.
It means wanting company in numbers. The facet sits inside Extraversion and measures the pull toward gatherings, busy places and full rooms, not how warm you are or how well you handle people. Everyday English uses the word for outgoing and charming; here it is narrower and duller.
No. Shyness lives in Self-Consciousness (N4), where a person wants company and dreads the opening move. This scale pulls the other way at minus 0.49, which still leaves room for the ordinary case: someone at ease in a crowd who would simply rather be elsewhere.
The average is 30.62 raw points out of 50, and the middle half of profiles falls between roughly 24 and 38. Low, average and high are cut at the 30th and 70th percentiles. Neither end is the better score, and the useful reading is in how it pairs with the others.
It is the third steepest age slide of the 30 facets, behind Excitement-Seeking and Depression. Men lose about 3 points from the youngest cell to the oldest and women about 5, while warmth in the same domain adds a point. That looks less like withdrawing from people than wanting fewer at once.
A little. Women average 31.25 and men 29.75, a gap of 1.5 points on a 40 point range, 16th of 30 for sex difference. Two people of the same sex routinely differ by more. It also narrows with age, from 2.1 points under 21 to 0.2 past 60.
We measured alpha at 0.890 for the 10 statement version and 0.796 for the 4 statement one, on the open data published by Johnson. That puts the long form level with Friendliness at the top of extraversion and inside the best five of 30. The 4 statement form stays usable and buys time at a cost in accuracy.
Two versions of the same 30 measures: 300 statements for the full picture or 120 for a quicker read. Both are free, and this facet comes back with the other 29.
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