Types / Personality traits
Five broad traits
See what you bring, and how others experience it.
Personality researchers describe five broad traits. The five are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional stability, and Openness, giving you a way to notice what you bring to situations and what others experience from you. Read all five here, or take the Personality Type assessment to see your own.
How to read a trait
Together, these are the five traits Personality Type measures. A score places a person somewhere between two ends of a scale, describing a tendency rather than putting them in a box. That place can help explain which patterns feel familiar across different parts of life.
Scores bunch here
Lower scoresHigher scores
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A range of tendencies
Each trait runs between two ends, and people can show either pattern in different settings. A higher score usually means one pattern is more available to a person, while a lower score makes its opposite more familiar, and neither end is better or a fault.
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The middle has meaning
A middle score is a result in its own right, showing that both ends can be part of a person’s usual range. Someone near the middle may recognize themselves in both descriptions, depending on the people, the pressure, and the choices involved.
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What the traits can show
Knowing the five gives people a way to see what higher and lower tendencies look like in daily life. That view can start a closer look at what they bring to a situation and what other people may experience from it.
The five traits
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More reservedMore outgoing
Extraversion
Where your energy tends to come from, and how readily you direct it toward people, activity, and the outside world.
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More practicalMore drawn to ideas
Openness
How readily your attention moves toward ideas, imagination, possibilities, and experiences that are not yet familiar.
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Less accommodatingMore accommodating
Agreeableness
How readily you make room for other people, and how you balance cooperation with your own needs, standards, and point of view.
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Less structuredMore structured
Conscientiousness
How strongly you turn intentions into plans, systems, and finished work.
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More sensitive to stressLess sensitive to stress
Emotional stability
How strongly and how long difficult feelings tend to move through you.
How the traits connect to other types
Each letter of a four-letter type (think ISFJ) comes from one of four measured traits: Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, or Conscientiousness. Emotional stability is measured separately. A letter is shorthand for which side of a scale you are nearer, not a box that contains you. Someone close to the midpoint may show either pattern depending on the situation, stakes, and habits they have built. Separately, research on interests found five strong overlaps between the five traits and Holland’s six interests[1].
| Trait | Four-letter type | Interest types linked in research |
|---|---|---|
| Extraversion | IE first letter | EEnterprising SSocial |
| Openness | SN second letter | AArtistic IInvestigative |
| Agreeableness | TF third letter | SSocial |
| Conscientiousness | PJ fourth letter | None of the five links |
| Emotional stability | None | None of the five links |
See all five of your scales
Answering 50 statements gives you all five scores at once, so you can see how you tend to be at work, with the people closest to you, and under pressure. Your four-letter type comes from the same answers.
Questions
Why does each letter come from a trait?
When researchers compared four-letter codes with the five traits, the letter scales lined up with four of the five traits instead of sorting people into separate types[2]. Their summary doesn’t spell out which letter goes with which trait, so the pairing is Nomigram’s choice.
How do these assessments compare with other sites?
These five traits are what researchers call the Big Five, the five-factor model, or OCEAN, named from Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Nomigram reports the last trait as Emotional stability, which names the other end of Neuroticism. Four-letter types on MBTI-style sites map onto four of these traits, using Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Emotional stability does not provide a letter.
Nomigram is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the Myers & Briggs Foundation, The Myers-Briggs Company or NERIS Analytics Limited, and the names are used here only to explain how our assessments relate to them. MBTI, Myers-Briggs and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Myers & Briggs Foundation, Inc. in the United States and other countries. 16Personalities is a trademark of NERIS Analytics Limited.
Where does this come from?
Each number in the text points to one of these studies.
- 1 Larson, Rottinghaus & Borgen (2002), Journal of Vocational Behavior 61, 217-239
- 2 McCrae & Costa (1989), Journal of Personality 57(1), 17-40 Link