How consistently you live by your own values across work, relationships, social settings, and solitude
About this assessment
An original 36-item self-report of dispositional authenticity inspired by Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis and Joseph's (2008) person-centred model — the interplay of authentic living (acting in line with your real values and feelings), resisting external influence (not letting others' expectations overwrite you), and low self-alienation (knowing and trusting your true self). It maps these processes across four arenas where the pressure to perform differs sharply: work, close relationships, wider social settings, and time alone. The result estimates the overall percentage of your life lived as the real you, and shows where you stay true versus where you quietly switch into a version others expect. Items are original to this assessment and reproduce no copyrighted scale. For education and self-reflection only — not a clinical or diagnostic instrument.
Your result breaks down across 4 measured dimensions
WorkClose RelationshipsSocial SettingsAlone
This assessment includes built-in validity checks. Your result includes a confidence rating based on response consistency.
About the Authenticity Assessment
An original 36-item self-report of dispositional authenticity inspired by Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis and Joseph's (2008) person-centred model — the interplay of authentic living (acting in line with your real values and feelings), resisting external influence (not letting others' expectations overwrite you), and low self-alienation (knowing and trusting your true self). It maps these processes across four arenas where the pressure to perform differs sharply: work, close relationships, wider social settings, and time alone. The result estimates the overall percentage of your life lived as the real you, and shows where you stay true versus where you quietly switch into a version others expect. Items are original to this assessment and reproduce no copyrighted scale. For education and self-reflection only — not a clinical or diagnostic instrument.
What this test measures
Your result is broken down across 4 distinct dimensions rather than collapsing everything into a single number. Each dimension is scored from its own set of items, so you can see which specific pattern is driving your overall result.
Work — measured across 9 items.
Close Relationships — measured across 9 items.
Social Settings — measured across 9 items.
Alone — measured across 9 items.
How to read your result
Scores fall into one of 4 interpretive bands. Here is what each one means, what tends to sit underneath it, and what usually helps.
Mostly Performing
Across most of your life, the version of you the world meets is a carefully managed one. You spend real energy reading rooms, predicting what people want, and adjusting yourself to fit — so often that your honest preferences and feelings frequently go unspoken, sometimes even to yourself. The relief you feel when plans cancel or when you're finally alone is the tell: being 'on' costs you something.
What it suggests In Wood and colleagues' model this usually reflects two forces working together — a strong pull to accept external influence and a degree of self-alienation, where the signal of what you actually feel gets drowned out by what's expected. This is rarely fakery for its own sake. Far more often it's a strategy learned somewhere being your true self didn't feel safe or welcome. The cost is a quiet, persistent sense that nobody really knows you, because the real you rarely gets to walk into the room.
What helps Start small and private. Once a day, before answering 'what do you want?', pause and check your own gut before you scan for the 'right' answer. Pick one low-stakes relationship and practice saying one true thing you'd normally soften. If the gap between your public and private self feels distressing or long-running, a few sessions with a person-centred or schema-focused therapist can help you find where the performing began and loosen its grip.
Selectively Guarded
You're genuinely yourself in some corners of your life and slip into a managed role in others. There are specific arenas — often work or wider social settings — where you trade authenticity for acceptance or safety, while keeping a truer self for the people and moments you trust most. The split is real and you can probably name exactly where it falls.
What it suggests This is one of the most common patterns and it isn't automatically unhealthy; some contexts genuinely call for restraint. The question worth sitting with is whether your guardedness is a deliberate choice or an automatic reflex. Look at your lowest-scoring domain in the breakdown — that's usually where the cost is quietly compounding, where you most often agree when you disagree, or perform a version of yourself that leaves you a little hollowed out by the end.
What helps Take your weakest domain and treat it as your growth edge: pick one recurring situation there where you could show 10% more of the real you. Learn the difference between strategic discretion, which is fine, and self-erasure, which leaves you resentful or tired afterward. And protect the relationships where you already get to be unguarded — they're what make the guarded hours survivable.
Largely Genuine
For the most part, the person you show the world matches the person you are inside. You know your own mind, you can voice it even when it's inconvenient, and you don't dissolve into other people's expectations easily — though there are still particular settings and particular people who can tip you into bending more than you'd like.
What it suggests You have the core machinery of authenticity running well: a fairly clear read on your own feelings (low self-alienation) and a real willingness to act on them (authentic living). Your remaining edge is situational — a specific kind of person, stake, or mood that still pulls you into people-pleasing. Because you're authentic most of the time, those exceptions stand out clearly, which makes them worth your curiosity rather than your dismissal.
What helps Map your tipping points: which people, stakes, or moods reliably pull you off-center? Practice catching the bend in real time — that small internal 'that wasn't quite true' — and correcting course sooner. And keep checking that your authenticity stays kind as well as honest; the aim is to be fully yourself in a way that still leaves room for everyone else to be themselves too.
Fully Yourself
You live with a rare consistency between your inner world and your outer life. You know what you feel, you trust it, and you act on it across work, relationships, social settings, and your own private time — without losing yourself to other people's expectations or to your own self-doubt. Watched or unwatched, you're the same continuous person.
What it suggests Scores this high reflect all three components of the model running strong at once: clear self-knowledge, behavior aligned with your values, and resistance to external pressure. That consistency is linked to greater well-being and steadier relationships, because the people around you get a stable, trustworthy version of you. The one honest caveat is response style — very high self-reports can occasionally reflect an idealized self-image, so the truest test isn't how authentic you feel on a good day, but how authentic you stay when being yourself carries a real cost.
What helps Spend your authenticity on others: people who can be fully themselves tend to make it safer for everyone nearby to drop their own masks. Stay alert to the thin line between honesty and bluntness — your truth lands best when it's paired with care. And keep noticing the rare moments when even you still bend, because that's where the last and most interesting growth quietly lives.
How this test is scored
Authenticity Assessment contains 36 items and takes about 9 minutes. Responses are combined using a sum method across the dimensions listed above, then mapped to the interpretive bands above. Your percentile is an interim estimate that sharpens as more people take the test, and is labelled as provisional in your result.
This assessment also includes hidden validity items that detect inattentive or socially-desirable answering. When they trigger, your result carries a lowered confidence rating and we tell you — rather than presenting a skewed score as fact.
The test ships in 10 parallel forms that rotate between takes, so repeat visitors do not simply memorise the same items.
Limits of this assessment
This is an educational, self-reflective assessment — not a diagnosis. A questionnaire can describe a pattern and point you toward language for it, but it cannot account for your history, context, or circumstances, and it is not a substitute for evaluation by a qualified professional. If a result concerns you, treat it as a reason to talk to someone rather than as a verdict.
Your answers are scored on your device. Taking this test requires no account, no email address, and no payment, and your full result — every band, every dimension — is shown to you immediately and in full.