Built on a simple conviction
Self-knowledge is not a luxury. It is the foundation of everything else — how we relate to others, what we believe, what we want, and why.Why CoreTraits exists
Most people move through life with an incomplete picture of themselves. Not because they lack intelligence or curiosity — but because the tools for genuine self-reflection have either been locked behind expensive clinical frameworks, buried in academic literature, or reduced to the kind of social media quiz that tells you which pasta shape you are.
CoreTraits was built to sit in the space between those extremes. Rigorous enough to be meaningful. Accessible enough that anyone can use it. Honest enough to tell you something you might not already know.
The domains we have chosen — politics, music, desire, and the others in development — were not picked at random. They are the areas of human experience where self-understanding matters most and where misunderstanding causes the most damage. A person who does not understand their own political instincts is easier to manipulate. A person who does not understand their own desire carries unnecessary shame about something that is simply part of who they are.
CoreTraits is a research project as much as it is a product. Every result contributes to an anonymised dataset that we hope, over time, will illuminate patterns in human psychology that have never been mapped at this scale or across these particular domains.
Standing on shoulders
CoreTraits did not emerge from nowhere. The idea that human psychology can be mapped along axes — that people can be understood as positions in a space rather than members of fixed categories — has been developed by researchers, clinicians, and independent developers over many decades. We owe a genuine debt to that tradition.
The following tools and frameworks were part of the intellectual landscape that shaped how we think about profiling, scoring, and presenting results. We acknowledge them with respect and gratitude.
The most widely used personality instrument in the world. MBTI demonstrated that personality could be mapped across dichotomous dimensions — Introversion/Extraversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving — and that the resulting types were recognisable and meaningful to the people who received them. Whatever its clinical limitations, MBTI proved that millions of people are hungry for this kind of self-knowledge when it is presented accessibly.
The Political Compass was genuinely important. By adding a second axis — Authoritarian to Libertarian — to the traditional left/right economic spectrum, it gave millions of people a way to understand their political position that the standard left/right binary could not provide. It was also one of the first profiling tools to gain serious popular traction on the internet, demonstrating that rigorous self-assessment could find a mass audience. Our politics domain is a direct descendant of its core insight.
The Big Five — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism — is the most empirically validated personality model in academic psychology. Unlike MBTI, it treats personality dimensions as continuous spectra rather than binary types, and it has accumulated decades of cross-cultural research. CoreTraits uses a similar continuous-spectrum approach to scoring rather than forcing results into fixed categories.
Alfred Kinsey's 0–6 scale of sexual orientation was one of the first serious attempts to treat human sexuality as a spectrum rather than a binary. At a time when the dominant framework allowed only for heterosexual or homosexual, Kinsey insisted that reality was more continuous and more complicated. That conviction — that human experience resists simple categorisation and that honest measurement requires nuance — is central to how CoreTraits approaches its desire domain.
bdsmtest.org pioneered accessible, non-judgmental self-assessment in a domain that had almost no mainstream representation in profiling tools. By treating kink and sexual preference as legitimate subjects for structured self-reflection, and by presenting results without shame or clinical framing, it helped normalise a conversation that millions of people needed to have with themselves. The spirit of that project — that people deserve accurate mirrors even for the parts of themselves they have been taught to hide — is directly reflected in the design of CoreTraits' desire domain.
What is original
Acknowledging our inspirations honestly also requires being equally honest about what distinguishes CoreTraits from them. Inspiration is not the same as derivation. CoreTraits is an independent, original work.
Axis-based personality profiling
Presenting results as named types
Continuous spectrum scoring
Self-administered online format
All question text across every domain
All axis definitions and pole labels
All 32 persona names and write-ups
The 7-point hybrid scoring system
The multi-domain architecture
The demographic research layer
The desire domain axis framework
A note on intellectual property. The concept of mapping personality along axes is not owned by any individual or organisation — it is a scientific and cultural idea that belongs to everyone. CoreTraits makes no claim to the methodologies, instruments, questions, scoring systems, type labels, or intellectual property of any of the tools acknowledged above.
Equally, no affiliation with or endorsement by any of those organisations should be inferred. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are trademarks of The Myers-Briggs Company. Political Compass is a trademark of its respective owners. CoreTraits is an independent product with no commercial or institutional relationship to any of the tools mentioned on this page.
If you believe any element of CoreTraits infringes on intellectual property you hold, please contact us directly before taking any other action. We take these matters seriously and will respond promptly.
What comes next
CoreTraits is in active development. The politics and desire domains are live. Music is in testing. Film, travel, dark personality traits, and philosophy are in design. Each domain follows the same architecture — original questions, original axes, original personas — applied to a different slice of human experience.
The longer-term ambition is research. As results accumulate, the anonymised dataset will allow us to explore questions that have never been systematically studied: how political instinct and sexual desire correlate, whether musical preference predicts personality, how these profiles vary across age, gender, and culture. None of that is possible without the people who take the time to answer honestly.
If you are one of those people — thank you.