Mirror

Reading your answers

Method

Mirror asks one set of questions and reads them four different ways. Here is what each of those ways is worth.

The five-factor model is the most replicated finding in personality research. It was not designed by anyone: it fell out of decades of work analysing the words languages use to describe people, and the same five dimensions keep reappearing across cultures and translations.

The sixty items here come from the International Personality Item Pool, used word for word. IPIP is public domain and widely validated, which is what makes this scale worth taking seriously rather than a questionnaire someone wrote one afternoon. Each of the five traits is measured through six narrower facets, two items each.

Attachment is measured on two continuous dimensions — anxiety about closeness being withdrawn, and avoidance of depending on people. The four familiar styles are just the quadrants those two dimensions make, which is why a score near the middle makes the label nearly meaningless and the numbers much more informative.

The theory is well established. The eighteen items are written for Mirror against the published construct definitions rather than taken from the ECR-R, which is copyrighted. So the construct is sound; these particular items have not been separately validated.

Schwartz's ten basic values have held up well across more than eighty countries. They are measured here relative to each other rather than against a population — your own average is the baseline, so there is no such thing as a low score, only a lower priority. That is the standard way values are handled, because almost everyone rates almost every value as somewhat important.

DISC is widely used in workplaces and has far less evidence behind it than the Big Five. It has no meaningful population norms, so it is shown here as a shape — which of the four leads in you — rather than as levels. Treat it as a useful vocabulary for how you work with people, not as a measurement.

Mirror's code is built from its own four axes, each named for what that end of the scale is actually for. Energy runs from Gather to Retreat. Attention from Wander to Anchor. Compass from Harmony to Candour. Tempo from Order to Drift.

Then a fifth: sensitivity, Tender or Steady. Almost every code-based system stops at four and leaves this one out, which has always seemed a strange omission — how early and how strongly you feel things changes the texture of everything else about you. A Tender Steward and a Steady Steward run on quite different fuel.

The code is read off the same answers as everything else on this page, not measured separately. The known weakness of any code is that it turns a continuous scale into a side: someone at the 51st percentile gets the same letter as someone at the 99th. So Mirror shows how far from the middle each of your axes actually sits, and says plainly when one is close enough to go either way.

A percentile says how you compare with other people, not how much of something you have. The 70th percentile on conscientiousness means roughly seventy people in a hundred are less organised than you — it does not mean you are organised seventy per cent of the time.

The bar under each score is a confidence interval. It is wide when few items sit behind a score and narrow when many do, and it is the honest part of the display: a score of 61 with an interval of 52 to 70 is really saying "somewhere in the upper middle", and should be read that way. If two of your traits have overlapping intervals, they are not meaningfully different from each other.

Percentiles are calculated against published population figures from the research literature, not against people who have taken Mirror. They are indicative rather than exact, and they will be replaced with norms computed from real responses once enough people have completed the full version.

This is not a clinical instrument and nothing here is a diagnosis. Personality traits are moderately stable in adults but they do move, particularly over years and after significant events. A result describes how you answered today, in the mood you were in, about the version of yourself you had in mind.

Scores also predict tendencies across many people rather than what any one person will do. Knowing someone is in the lower third for extraversion tells you very little about whether they will enjoy a particular party.

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