Dear Hume is meant to be fun, and it's built on real research. Here's what the questions measure, where they come from and how your Portrait is put together.
| what | how | source and licence |
|---|---|---|
| Personality: the Big Five and their 30 facets | 60 questions, two per facet | IPIP-NEO-60 (Maples-Keller et al., 2019), built from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 2006). Public domain. |
| Career interests | 32 questions, read as the six Holland themes | Oregon Vocational Interest Scales, ORVIS (Pozzebon et al., 2010), also IPIP. Public domain. Themes from Holland (1997). |
| Values | 20 questions | Our own questions, based on Schwartz's theory of ten basic values (Schwartz, 1992). Shown as a ranking: what matters most to you. |
| Who you want to be | The Big Five, rated as "I want to be…", on door 1 and door 24 | Our wording. |
| Your daily weather | Mood and energy, one tap each, optional | Our questions. Used to see which answers move with the day. |
A one-sitting quiz catches you on one day. But people vary from day to day around a fairly stable centre (Fleeson, 2001). So we spread the questions across December, and about 24 of them come back, worded the same way, roughly a week later. Comparing the two answers shows what is steady in you and what moves with the day.
The repeats are spaced differently for each person, and we don't mark them. Answer how you feel today; there's no "right" answer to match.
Your answers are scored in code, the standard way for each scale, and the Big Five are compared with published norms for these items. In the Portrait we say it in words: very high (higher than 9 in 10 people), high, in the middle, low, very low. The exact numbers are on the last page.
For each trait we compare your repeated answers and how much your answers spread across the days. Little change means ink (steady). More change means pencil (shifts with the day). A link with mood or energy is mentioned only when it is clear, and always as a pattern, never a verdict.
We don't use a type questionnaire. Your four letters are worked out from the Big Five, which research shows line up with the four type scales (McCrae & Costa, 1989): extraversion gives E or I, openness N or S, agreeableness F or T, and conscientiousness J or P. When a trait sits near the middle, that letter is shown in pencil: it can flip with the day.
We compare where you are with where you want to be. Research on deliberate personality change suggests that people can move a trait a little over months when they act on it in specific ways, week after week (Hudson & Fraley, 2015; Hudson et al., 2019). The 2027 plan is built around that.
The words in your Portrait are drafted by an AI model from your scores and your own notes, under fixed rules. The numbers come straight from the scoring, never from the AI.
These are self-reports: they show how you see yourself, which isn't the whole of you. Percentiles compare you with the people in published research samples, not with everyone. Short scales are less precise than long ones, which is part of why we show ranges and repeat questions. And the work suggestions point to kinds of work worth exploring; they aren't a verdict on what you can or can't do.
Dear Hume isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any of these authors or with the owners of any personality test named above. Questions or corrections: [email protected].