Why Profilia exists.

Who I am

I'm Adrien Albuquerque. Trained as a software developer, fascinated by psychology since my teens, I built Profilia because the personality tests available online either kept their detailed results behind paywalls (16personalities, Truity), or served as a pretext to harvest emails and resell ad attention. I haven't found one that is both clear about its limits and respectful of users' time.

Profilia is my antidote: 11 personality tests of differing standing (the details are in the methodology further down), free, no account, no marketing tracking. I've been maintaining it solo since March 2026.

Why exactly these tests

Each test explores a different angle of personality, behavior, identity, rhythm, motivation, learning, life as a couple, and starts from an existing model. Some are published models studied by researchers, such as the Big Five or RIASEC; others come from popular books or traditions, such as the four-animal chronotype or the spirit animal. None are invented for decoration, and the methodology below says where each one comes from.

The end goal is the Personality DNA: by completing at least 2 tests, Profilia places the dominant profile of each of your tests on five axes and shows where your results point, for indicative purposes, without measurement or norm.

Methodology and sources

Profilia's 11 tests do not all have the same scientific standing, and this section says exactly what each one is. Only one is adapted from a research instrument: the Big Five. The others draw on well-known models: one research model, RIASEC, and educational, popular, historical or symbolic models.

The Big Five: adapted from a public-domain research instrument

The Big Five test is adapted from the 50-item IPIP representation of the Goldberg (1992) markers for the Big-Five factor structure. These items were placed in the public domain by the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). Reference: Goldberg, L. R. (1992), “The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure”, Psychological Assessment, 4, 26-42. The direction of each item (direct or reversed) follows the scoring key published by the IPIP: Big-Five Factor Markers (ipip.ori.org).

Goldberg designed these markers to locate other measures within the five-factor structure. He himself distinguishes them from personality scales meant for decision making about individuals in applied contexts, whose evaluation criteria are far more diverse and demanding (Goldberg, 1992, p. 27). Your result therefore describes how you see yourself: it is not meant for hiring, career guidance or diagnosis. We also have no reference group: the five scores are shown side by side, without ranking you against a population and without a dominant factor.

Two deviations I would rather flag myself. The first: in the IPIP key, Goldberg's fifth factor is called “Intellect or Imagination”. I named it Openness, the name it carries in other versions of the Big Five, because it speaks more clearly to a general audience. This choice changes the displayed name, not the items. The second: the scores shown are not the raw sums of the IPIP key. Some factors have more direct items than others, and we remove from each score the general tendency to answer “agree”, so that this response style does not inflate some factors more than others.

The original items are in English. We rewrote them ourselves in the site's five languages, English included, and none of these versions has undergone psychometric validation. The IPIP itself states that the translations it lists have not been verified by anyone associated with the project. Published validations do exist for a shorter version, the 20-item Mini-IPIP, in French, Spanish and European Portuguese; we found none in Brazilian Portuguese, and none covers our translations. Switching to the Mini-IPIP would change the instrument, not just the translation, so we keep the 50-item version and say so. For the same reason, a score obtained in one language cannot be compared directly with a score obtained in another.

Online tests, without supervision

Every test is taken online, on your own, with no professional beside you and no account required. We cannot verify who is answering or under what conditions. A result should therefore be read as a general description of tendencies, not as an individual assessment, and none of them is a diagnosis.

Test by test: what each model is

Apart from the Big Five, none of our questionnaires is a validated instrument: we wrote them ourselves from the models below. Only one of these models comes from research, RIASEC; the others come from education, popular books, or historical and symbolic traditions.

• DISC : popular model. Four primary emotions described by William Marston (1928), which later DISC questionnaires drew on. There is neither a free questionnaire usable commercially nor a solid academic norm. A support for team discussion, not a hiring tool.
• Leadership Style : popular model. Daniel Goleman's six styles (2000), drawn from Hay/McBer studies never published in a peer-reviewed journal, set against the authoritarian, democratic and laissez-faire group climates studied by Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939). A support for reflection with your team, not a professional assessment.
• Love Languages : popular model. Gary Chapman's five love languages (1992), a relationship-advice book. A study of 696 participants (Flicker and Sancier-Barbosa, 2024) did not confirm its central hypothesis. A way to open the conversation as a couple.
• RIASEC : research model. John Holland's six types of vocational interests (1959), the most solid foundation in the catalogue after the Big Five. The fit between your interests and your job is only modestly related to job satisfaction (Hoff and colleagues, 2020). A starting point for exploring options, not a career decision.
• Four Temperaments : historical model. Four temperaments inherited from Hippocrates and Galen. Not a measure: Hans Eysenck linked them to two dimensions that research does measure, extraversion and emotional stability.
• Jung Archetypes : popular model. Twelve archetypes from Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson, “The Hero and the Outlaw” (2001), a brand-strategy book inspired by Carl Jung's notion of the archetype. Our questionnaire is not a validated measure, even though, in one study, attraction to these figures falls into five families (Faber and Mayer, 2009). A symbolic tool for self-exploration.
• Chronotype : popular model. Dr. Michael Breus's four chronotypes (Lion, Bear, Wolf, Dolphin), “The Power of When” (2016), a popular science book. Chronotype itself is well studied (Horne and Östberg questionnaire, 1976), but this four-animal split has not been validated.
• Spirit Animal : symbolic. Animal symbolism from several traditions, with no scientific framework. McAdams and Pals (2006) distinguish the traits we measure from the images and stories through which people tell who they are; a spirit animal belongs to the latter. A game of self-reflection, to be taken as such.
• Four Tendencies : popular model. Gretchen Rubin's four tendencies, “The Four Tendencies” (2017), a self-help book. No independent validation: the only publication we found that studies it is co-authored by Rubin herself.
• VARK : contested teaching model. Learning preferences according to Neil Fleming and Colleen Mills (1992). Studies do not show that learning in your preferred modality improves retention (Pashler and colleagues, 2008). The official VARK questionnaire is copyrighted: ours is independent.
• Big Five : adapted from a research instrument. The 50-item IPIP representation of the Goldberg (1992) markers, in the public domain, detailed above.

Privacy commitment

Profilia is deliberately the opposite of the dominant business model for quiz sites. Concretely:

• No account required to take a test, see your results, or share them. If you create an account, it's only to keep history across devices, toggleable.
• No marketing cookies, no ad pixels, no data resale. Internal tracking anonymizes via a daily-rotating salt (Plausible-style, GDPR-compliant under France's CNIL audience-measurement exemption of July 4th, 2025).
• Source code not yet public but could become so. If transparency matters to you, ask.

Get in touch

Question, correction on a test, suggestion, editorial partnership: [email protected]. I reply.