Sixteen Primary-Factor Scales

Sixteen primary factors describe personality in detail: Warmth, Reasoning, Emotional Stability, Dominance, Liveliness, Rule-Consciousness, Social Boldness, Sensitivity, Vigilance, Abstractedness, Privateness, Apprehension, Openness to Change, Self-Reliance, Perfectionism and Tension. With about ten statements each, the scales describe each factor fully, covering for example both the social and the emotional sides of Warmth.

Cattell spent several decades identifying the basic dimensions of personality through factor analysis of ratings, questionnaires and behavior, and arrived at sixteen primary factors (Cattell, Eber and Tatsuoka, 1970). The primary factors in turn group into broader global factors that resemble the five-factor model. Goldberg (1999) wrote parallel scales for the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

Each factor is scored separately. Each has two named poles: low Warmth describes reserve and high Warmth describes outgoing attentiveness; low Abstractedness describes a practical focus and high Abstractedness describes absorption in ideas. Neither pole is better in itself. The profile is read as a whole, with attention to combinations of factors.

The scales are used in counseling, career guidance and research. On this site, the Sixteen-Factor Personality Profile is a shorter version with three statements per factor, the Big-Five Factor Markers describe five broad factors, and the Folk-Concept Trait Scales describe everyday traits.

Cattell believed the trait lexicon could be distilled empirically: starting from the Allport–Odbert term list, he condensed thousands of descriptors into rating clusters compact enough to factor (Cattell, 1943), then spent decades pursuing the primary 'source traits' he took to underlie surface behavior. The 16PF operationalized his answer — sixteen oblique primary factors, documented at length in the questionnaire's handbook (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970), with broader second-order dimensions computed from them.

The line to the Big Five runs straight through this program: it was reanalyses of ratings built on Cattell's variables that kept recovering five broad factors (Tupes & Christal, 1992). The 16PF tradition kept the finer grain, and its fifth edition (Conn & Rieke, 1994) standardized the modern factor names used here — making this collection both an ancestor of and an alternative to five-factor description.

Scale membership and reverse-keying follow Goldberg's IPIP multi-scale map (ScalesFor967items) verbatim, with construct names as catalogued at ipip.ori.org.

These scales represent sixteen primary personality factors, such as warmth, dominance, vigilance and perfectionism, that group into broader factors resembling the five-factor model (Goldberg et al., 2006). The public-domain scales converge with the commercial primary-factor scales they were built to match (Goldberg et al., 2006).

Narrow traits like these add to the prediction of behavior beyond the broad five factors, which supports measuring them separately (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).

“Act wild and crazy.”

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

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.