Character Strengths Test

Which of the six classic virtues is strongest in you?

8 min · Free · No account

Character Strengths Test: A coworker sliding an eTestor mug of tea to a tired teammate across a desk covered in sticky notes

What are the 24 character strengths?

They are the strengths in the classification Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman published in 2004, sorted under six virtues. Wisdom: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning and perspective. Courage: bravery, perseverance, honesty and zest. Humanity: love, kindness and social intelligence. Justice: teamwork, fairness and leadership. Temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence and self-regulation. Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality. This test scores the six virtues and shows you, free, which one is strongest in you.

About this test

Psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman sorted 24 character strengths, from curiosity and honesty to gratitude and humor, under six virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. This test asks 48 statements about ordinary moments, such as a stalled group project, a friend's bad week or an apology, and scores all six. Your strongest virtue is your top score, and the full profile shows how the other five compare. It describes how you see yourself; it is not a measure of how good a person you are.

What you'll discover

Wisdom
How you use your mind: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning and perspective.
Courage
How you keep going against resistance: bravery, perseverance, honesty and zest.
Humanity
How you care for the people close to you: love, kindness and social intelligence.
Justice
How you act in groups and communities: teamwork, fairness and leadership.
Temperance
How you hold yourself back from excess: forgiveness, humility, prudence and self-regulation.
Transcendence
How you connect to something larger than the day: appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor and a sense of meaning.

Understanding the Character Strengths Test

This strengths test gives you 48 statements about ordinary moments, like a stalled group project, a friend's hard week or an apology you weren't sure you'd accept. It takes about 8 minutes. It scores the six virtues from Peterson and Seligman's classification, eight statements each, and your strongest virtue is free when you finish. The full report shows all six, so you can see whether one virtue clearly leads or several sit close together.

We score six virtues rather than 24 separate strengths on purpose. Ranking 24 strengths reliably takes far more than 48 questions: with two statements per strength, a single answer could move a strength up or down the list. Eight statements per virtue give six scores we can stand behind. Each statement still targets one named strength, all 24 appear at least once, and two statements per virtue are worded the other way round, so agreeing with everything does not lift your scores.

The six virtues are the weakest part of the model, and we'd rather say so. When researchers analyze answers to strength surveys, they usually find four or five clusters that do not match the six virtues well, and a study of over a million responses proposed three broader ones: caring, inquisitiveness and self-control (McGrath, Journal of Positive Psychology, 2015, doi:10.1080/17439760.2014.994222). The strengths themselves hold up better. In a study of 5,299 adults, hope, zest, gratitude, love and curiosity were the strengths most consistently tied to life satisfaction (Park, Peterson and Seligman, 2004, doi:10.1521/jscp.23.5.603.50748).

Where the Character Strengths Test comes from

Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman led the project behind Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford University Press, 2004). It describes 24 character strengths, from curiosity and honesty to gratitude and humor, sorted under six virtues drawn from philosophical and religious traditions: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

How the Character Strengths Test is scored

Six scores, one per virtue, each the sum of eight statements (8 to 40), two of them reverse-worded so that agreeing with everything does not push the result up. Your strongest virtue is your highest score. The six-virtue grouping is the contested part of the model: factor analyses of strength surveys usually find four or five factors that do not match the six well, and McGrath (2015) proposed three. The statements here are eTestor's own and have not been validated against the research questionnaire.

Popular framework with contested empirical support

Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of Character and Well-Being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603–619.

Questions people ask

Is the strengths test free?

Yes. The test and your strongest virtue are free, with no account needed: just your email at the end. Every score, the written analysis and the certificate are in the full report: $1.99$2.41 in the first 30 minutes after you finish, $3.99$4.83 after that, or included in eTestor Unlimited.

How do I find out what my strengths are?

Start with what you actually do, not with words you'd like to describe you. Rating yourself as kind or brave is easy to answer flatteringly, so this test asks about specific moments instead. Then check the result with people who know you: ask two of them which of your six virtue scores sounds most like you. Where your answers and theirs agree, you have found a strength.

What is a signature strength?

Positive psychologists use the term for the few strengths that feel most like you: the ones you use without being asked and enjoy using. This test works one level up. Your strongest virtue points to the group your signature strengths most likely come from, and the statements you agreed with most firmly show which ones.

Is this the questionnaire used in character strengths research?

No. Most research on the 24 strengths uses the questionnaire Peterson and Seligman's team built. We wrote our own 48 statements on the same classification, and they have not been checked against that questionnaire. Treat your result as a structured self-reflection on the same framework, not as a research score.

Can this help me answer "What are your strengths?" in a job interview?

It can give you the words. Interviewers usually want one strength and a real example, so take your strongest virtue, find the statement you agreed with most firmly, and think of a time you did exactly that. "I'm fair" is weak. "When two people on my team disagreed, I heard both of them out before we decided" is an answer.