Self-report measure

Sensation-Seeking: Dangerous thrill-seeking

Sensation-Seeking: Dangerous thrill-seeking uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Sensation-Seeking: Dangerous thrill-seeking.

You learn how strongly you are drawn to genuinely dangerous thrills.

For anyone drawn to risky activities and wonders how far that pull goes.

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Report and PDF $4, paid after you finish.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from personality research on seeking excitement despite real danger.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Sensation-Seeking: Dangerous thrill-seeking uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Sensation-Seeking: Dangerous thrill-seeking.

The measure

It has 10 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale.

International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org).

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Free to take · Full report and PDF for $4, or $2 to repeat

What it measures

Ten statements describe willingness to face physical danger for excitement: being drawn to activities that involve real risk, enjoying the feeling of being in danger, being willing to try anything once regardless of the hazards, and seeking out speed and extreme experiences.

Zuckerman (1979) described sensation seeking as the need for varied and intense experience and the willingness to take physical, social and other risks for it. Thrill and adventure seeking was one of its central components. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and describe the dangerous form of thrill-seeking separately.

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe a stronger attraction to physically risky excitement; lower scores describe a preference for safety. High scores have been associated with risky driving and extreme sports.

The scale is used in research on risk behavior and personality. On this site, the Calculated Thrill-Seeking and Impulsive Thrill-Seeking scales describe other forms, and the Psychopathy scale describes callous risk-taking.

Validity evidence

Dangerous thrill-seeking — preference for physically risky activities — is a core component of Zuckerman's (1994) sensation-seeking construct, validated across risk behavior, substance use, and personality research.

Example item

“Love dangerous situations.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.

References

Zuckerman, M. (1994). Behavioral expressions and biosocial bases of sensation seeking. Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7-28.

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.

It is free to take, and the full report with a downloadable copy is $4.

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