Character strengths are the ways of being good at being a person that show up across cultures and across history. There are 24 of them here, and everybody has all 24.
The list came out of a fairly unusual project. The question was what human beings have consistently admired in each other, asked by reading across philosophy and religious traditions from several continents and several thousand years. What kept appearing, and survived that filter, came to 24.
The claim is not that these are the only good qualities, or that the number is exact. It is that these particular 24 keep turning up, that they can be described clearly enough to ask questions about, and that people differ in which ones come most naturally to them.
That last part is the useful bit. Two people can both be thoroughly decent and be so in noticeably different ways, and the reason is usually that a different handful of these sits at the front for each of them.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentThis is where character strengths differ from most things that get measured. A result here is not 24 marks out of ten. It is the 24 put in order within one person, from the ones they reach for without being asked down to the ones they lean on less.
So the bottom of somebody's list is not a list of faults, and it is not a set of things to go and fix. The strength that came twenty-fourth is one they still have and still use. It simply is not among the first things they reach for, which is true of everybody about something.
It also means a result here says nothing about where somebody stands next to anybody else. There is no reference sample behind these 24 scales, so the honest thing this can do is order somebody's own answers against each other, and that is what it does.
Each one is described the same way wherever it appears, whether it came first in somebody's order or last. The descriptions below are the ones a reader meets on their own result.
Most material on character strengths sorts the 24 into six broad virtues. We show them flat, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving as a gap somebody notices.
The public item pool our questions come from publishes no grouping at all; its own table lists the 24 alphabetically. The six virtues were arrived at by reasoning about which strengths belong together, rather than by finding those groups in anybody's answers. When researchers have gone looking for structure in the data, they tend to recover three to five clusters instead of six.
None of that makes the six a bad way to think. It does mean that printing them next to a result would be handing somebody a piece of theory dressed as a finding about them, so we leave them out.
It does not say anybody is short of a strength. Every one of the 24 belongs to every person; the order says which ones come first for them, and nothing more.
It does not rank people against each other. There is no reference sample for these scales, so no result here can say where somebody sits among other people, and none of them tries to.
It does not measure character in the sense of how good somebody is. It measures which of 24 described qualities they recognize in themselves, from their own answers, on the day they answered.
And it is not a clinical instrument. Nothing here screens for anything, and nothing here is a verdict on a person.
The questions come from the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain set built on this same classification of 24. We use them unmodified, so the published reliability figures apply to the questions we ask rather than to something similar.
The descriptions are ours. They are written so that each one reads correctly whether a strength came first in somebody's order or twenty-fourth, which is the constraint that shapes every line of them.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentselfwyse helps you reflect and connect — not to diagnose, treat, or predict any medical, psychological, or mental health condition.
