Should You Retake a Personality Test? When to and When Not to

Most people who take a personality test once want to take it again. The question is whether that is useful or whether it is just a way to scratch an itch. The honest answer depends on two things: how much time has passed, and what changed in your life between the two attempts.

A well-built Big Five test is reliable enough that retaking it the next day will give you almost the same numbers. That sounds good, but it also means you should not expect new information from a retake unless something real has happened in the gap.

What "reliable" actually means here

A good Big Five inventory like the IPIP-NEO-120 has test-retest reliability in the 0.85 to 0.90 range over short intervals ¹. That is a technical way of saying the same person taking the same test twice within a few weeks will get scores that are very close, but not identical.

The small wobble between attempts is real and not a flaw. It comes from:

• Mood on the day you take it
• Different examples coming to mind for the same question
• Slightly different framing of "people in general" vs. "people I know"

A 5-percentile shift on a single trait between two attempts a month apart is normal noise. A 20-percentile shift is not.

The case for retaking

Three situations where a retake is actually informative.

Six months or more have passed and a real life event sits between the two tests. This is the strongest case. A job change, a long-term relationship starting or ending, a move, a serious health event, becoming a parent — all of these can shift trait scores in measurable ways over months, not days ². A retake in this case is not noise. It is a recalibration.

You actively worked on changing a trait pattern for at least three months. Studies on volitional personality change show measurable trait shifts when people deliberately practice new behaviors for 12 to 16 weeks ³. If you have done the work — set specific behavioral targets, tracked them, stayed with them past the point where motivation faded — a retake can show whether the work moved the score.

You were in an unusual state the first time and want a cleaner baseline. Taking a personality test in the middle of a depressive episode, a breakup, a layoff, or three weeks of bad sleep tends to inflate Neuroticism and depress Conscientiousness. The score is real, but it is the score of you-in-that-state, not you-at-baseline. Retaking when life has settled gives a cleaner read.

The case against retaking

A few situations where a retake will mostly waste your time.

Less than three months have passed and nothing meaningful changed. The scores will be within noise of the first attempt. The only reason to take it is curiosity, and curiosity is fine — but it will not surface new information.

You did not like the first result. This is the most common reason people retake, and it is the one most likely to mislead them. A retake taken with the goal of "getting a different answer" tends to nudge responses without the person noticing, which makes the second score less honest than the first. If the first result felt wrong, the more useful move is usually reading it more carefully — especially the facet breakdown — rather than taking it again hoping for different numbers.

You took the test once when stressed and once when relaxed. Both scores are real but they are measuring different things. Without naming the difference in state, comparing them just adds confusion.

How traits actually change over time

The longest-running research on personality change is the Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer meta-analysis of mean-level change across the lifespan ⁴. They found a clear pattern called the maturity principle:

• Conscientiousness rises across early and middle adulthood
• Agreeableness rises slowly across adulthood
• Neuroticism falls from the late teens through middle age
• Extraversion is roughly stable, with a small dip in old age
• Openness is roughly stable, with a small dip after middle age

The average change over a decade on any of these is roughly 5 to 10 percentile points. That is real but slow. A retake at 25 and 35 may show a meaningful shift on two or three traits. A retake at 25 and 26 almost certainly will not.

Beyond this baseline drift, intentional change can add on top — Hudson and Fraley's volitional change studies suggest people who actively practice trait-aligned behaviors see additional shifts of similar size over months, not years ³. The work has to be specific and sustained. Wanting to change a trait does not move it.

What to do instead of retaking, sometimes

If the urge to retake is really an urge to understand the first result better, a few moves that often do more.

Read the facet breakdown, not just the trait scores. A moderate Conscientiousness score made of high Self-Discipline and low Orderliness reads completely differently than the same score made of high Orderliness and low Self-Discipline. The facets are where the texture lives.

Compare the result to a specific recent decision. Pick a choice you made in the last month — a job, a fight, a thing you said yes to — and check whether the trait pattern would have predicted it. This builds calibration faster than a retake does.

Ask one person who knows you well to look at the result. Outside view often catches things the inside view does not. People who know you can usually confirm or push back on a profile faster than a retake can.

When you do retake

If you decide a retake is worth it, two small habits that make the comparison more honest:

• Take it at roughly the same time of day and life-state as the first one (not in the middle of a crisis, not right after a great week)
• Answer based on the last year as a whole, not the last week

A retake done this way, six months or more after the first, can be useful. A retake done in a different state without naming it tends to add noise instead of removing it.

Take or retake the assessment →

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