Where our questions come from, what evidence exists behind each one, and what it can and can’t tell you. Every assessment has its own page with the full detail — this is the shared version, and the honest summary of how the four compare.
These are not all equally well-evidenced, and we would rather show you that than average it out into one claim.
Most of our assessments are built from the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain item bank of roughly 3,320 items organized into 463 constructed scales. IPIP was created by Dr. Lewis Goldberg and collaborators and released for unrestricted use. The list above shows which of ours draw on it and which don’t.
No affiliation or endorsement. SelfWyse is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the International Personality Item Pool project, Dr. Goldberg, or the Oregon Research Institute.
IPIP being public domain means there’s no legal attribution requirement. We cite it anyway because it’s the actual credibility story — built on decades of published, open psychological research rather than a proprietary quiz — and that only works if the sourcing is visible and checkable.
The same principle cuts the other way, and it costs us something to keep. Our Enneagram assessment is built on questions we wrote ourselves, because every well-known Enneagram questionnaire is private property. The nine patterns behind it are the same ones every Enneagram test describes, and ours works from those. What we’re still working out is how accurately our particular questions point to each pattern.
We could describe the Enneagram’s general reputation and let you assume it belonged to our questions. We don’t. A reliability figure belongs to one specific set of questions rather than to an idea, so that assessment is marked as a pilot everywhere it appears, and it stays marked until the figures exist for our own items.
Only one of our assessments — the Big Five — is calibrated against a real distribution of scores, so it is the only one where a range genuinely says where you sit relative to other people. Those boundaries come from 695,290 people in the Open Psychometrics Project’s public IPIP dataset, worked out separately for each of the five traits.
For the others, no reference sample exists, so a range describes how you answered rather than where you stand. That distinction is enforced in the product, not just described here: assessments without norms carry no percentile language, no spectrum ladder, and no gap or compatibility score anywhere in their reports.
A volunteer sample is also not the general population. People who choose to take a free personality test online skew younger, more online, and more curious about personality. It is very large and it is real, but the ranges describe your position among people like that, not among all humans.
A range is not a category you belong to, not a measure of ability, and not a prediction. Two people either side of a boundary are more like each other than either is to the far end of their own range.
IPIP includes items written to correlate with the constructs behind several commercial personality instruments. Those are IPIP’s own public-domain items, not the licensed commercial items themselves. The constraint is naming rather than content: we don’t market any assessment under a commercial instrument’s name, and we don’t claim equivalence to a licensed original.
