The four questions
What is actually being measured, where the self items come from, and what a placement is.
Two people describe the same colleague. One says she is intense and the other says she is focused. They are describing the same behaviour in the same meetings, and the disagreement is not about her. It is about which of four things each of them was watching.
Four axes, each continuous, each running between two ends that are both ordinary ways to be. Where somebody sits on all four at once is what produces one of sixteen patterns.
Warmth: How much of you is organised around other people?
This is not how much somebody likes people, and it is not kindness. It is where attention goes by default. One end notices the room and adjusts; the other end stays on the task and assumes the room can speak up.
One end: You keep your own counsel. The other end: You are organised around others.
Drive: What do you do when pressure arrives?
Both ends are load bearing and neither is strength. Pushing back gets a decision made in the first two minutes and runs over the person who needed thirty more seconds. Absorbing it keeps a room calm and hides the fact that somebody is carrying too much.
One end: You absorb it. The other end: You push back.
Voltage: Where does your energy come back from?
The commonest misreading on the site. This is about what restores you, not about how much you talk. A person can be excellent company for three hours and need the drive home in silence, and that is one answer rather than a contradiction.
One end: Quiet puts it back. The other end: People put it back.
Depth: How far past the surface does your attention live?
One end is interested in what a thing means and reads intent into a short reply. The other end takes the short reply as a short reply. Neither is deeper than the other, and the second one is right more often than the first one expects.
One end: You take things as they come. The other end: You are always a layer down.
Where the questions come from
The items you answer about yourself are public domain IPIP factor markers, used as written. They are freely published, they have been used in research for decades, and we did not invent them.
We are naming that for two reasons. The first is that a product claiming to have discovered four new dimensions of personality would be lying. The second is that the interesting part of this product is not the self items at all. It is the five people, and the self items exist mainly to give their answers something to disagree with.
The self items exist mainly to give their answers something to disagree with.
Why a nearest match is not a diagnosis
The four axes are continuous, and the sixteen patterns are corners. Your answers put you somewhere in the space, and then we say which corner is nearest. That is a placement.
Somebody sitting close to the middle of an axis is genuinely between two patterns, and their nearest match is a rounding decision rather than a fact about them. We say so on the result: you get the closest pattern, the runner up, and a warning when the two are close enough to be a coin toss.
This is why nothing on this site says you are a Lighthouse. It says a pattern, and it describes the pattern, and it leaves you to decide whether the description makes you wince. The sixteen are here if you want to read them and judge for yourself.
What the four questions cannot do
They cannot tell you how good you are at your job. They cannot tell you whether a relationship will work. They do not measure intelligence, mental health, honesty or anything a person could be discriminated against for having.
They also produce no percentile. Saying you are in the eightieth percentile for Drive requires a comparison group large enough for the number to mean something, and ours is small. The day it is not, we will publish the number that changed it.
The part this page cannot do
Everything above is the instrument. An instrument is not a finding, and reading about one tells you nothing about yourself.
Your own answers can place you on these four. What they cannot do is tell you whether the people around you would put you in the same place, and that gap is the entire reason this exists.
Start the interviewIt takes about fifteen minutes and it is free. The $29 Portrait is only charged after five people finish and the evidence clears.