What Does the Average Big Five Result Actually Look Like?
A personality test gives you five numbers — but is a 70% in Openness high? Does scoring high in one trait mean anything for the others? Instead of guessing, we scored 19,718 real responses to the 50-item IPIP Big Five — the same instrument our free Big Five test uses — into the five OCEAN traits, and looked at how the whole population actually spreads out.
Each trait has its own shape
Plotting the share of people at each score band shows the traits are not interchangeable. Openness and Agreeableness lean high — most people land in the upper bands — while Extraversion and Neuroticism are the widest and flattest, spread almost evenly across the range. That is why a “70%” means different things on different traits: it is well above average on Extraversion but only middling on Openness.
OpennessConscientiousnessExtraversionAgreeablenessNeuroticism
The five traits barely correlate
This is the whole point of the Big Five, and the data confirms it. Off the diagonal, every correlation is small: the strongest is Extraversion with Agreeableness at 0.33, and the clearest pattern is that Neuroticism edges down as Conscientiousness and Extraversion go up (both about −0.26). Nothing close to redundant — the five axes really do capture five different things.
Pearson correlation between traits (O C E A N). Teal = positive, amber = negative; deeper = stronger.
Low, average, high — the real split
Our test labels a result Low, Average or High. Splitting the 10–50 range into thirds, here is how the 19,718 people actually fell — and the “average” band is where most of them sit, especially on Conscientiousness and Neuroticism. On Openness and Agreeableness, though, most of this sample lands in the High third, so “High” there is closer to normal than exceptional.
| Trait | Mean /50 | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Openness | 39.09 | 1.2% | 36.8% | 62.1% |
| Conscientiousness | 33.47 | 8.9% | 61% | 30.1% |
| Extraversion | 30.11 | 25.5% | 50.9% | 23.6% |
| Agreeableness | 38.45 | 3.8% | 35.9% | 60.3% |
| Neuroticism | 30.97 | 20.9% | 54.4% | 24.7% |
Low = score 10–23, Average = 24–37, High = 38–50. Curious where you land? Take the free Big Five test — no email, instant result.
Reproduce this
Every number comes from one public dataset and a short scoring script you can run.
- Data: the Open-Source Psychometrics BIG5 dataset — 19,719 anonymous responses to the 50-item IPIP Big Five, released for research.
- Scoring: each trait is the sum of its 10 items (10–50), reverse items recoded as 6 − value, on the standard IPIP-50 keys.
- Reported: per-trait distribution and band split, plus the 5×5 Pearson correlation matrix, over 19,718 complete responses.
One honest caveat: this is a self-selected online sample (people who chose to take a personality test), not a representative population. The distribution shapes and the near-zero correlations are the robust findings; the absolute trait means reflect who takes online quizzes. The instrument is the same IPIP-50 our Big Five test uses.