3 min · free · no account
Authenticity Test — How True You Stay to Yourself
Fifteen items measuring how consistent you are across the different rooms of your life, how well you know your own positions, and whether you act on them.
- Original scale
- Items
- 15
- Time
- 3 min
- Scales
- 3
- Scale
- 5-pt
Free, no account needed. Your answers are not shared.
You'll find out: How much you edit yourself between contexts, and whether your choices line up with what you claim matters.
Want to understand what you’re about to do? The sections below explain what this assessment measures, where the questions came from, and what you’ll see at the end. Already decided? The start button is up top.
What this is really asking
Authenticity is often described as being the same person everywhere, which is not quite right — everyone adjusts register between a board meeting and a family dinner, and that adjustment is social competence rather than falseness. What the research points to is narrower: whether the adjustment extends to your stated positions and values, or stops at tone and vocabulary.
Three strands are scored here. Cross-context consistency covers how much your behavior changes between audiences. Self-knowledge covers whether you can actually articulate your own positions, which is a prerequisite for the rest — you cannot be untrue to something you have never identified. Value alignment covers the gap between what you say matters and what your decisions reveal.
The most common pattern is high self-knowledge with lower alignment: knowing exactly what you believe and regularly acting otherwise, usually for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time. This tends to be more corrosive than inconsistency across contexts, because the person keeping score is you.
The parts it pulls apart
- Cross-Context Consistency — Being one person everywhere
- Self-Knowledge — Knowing what you actually think and feel
- Value Alignment — Acting on your values when it costs you
What lands on your screen at the end
You get three scores charted with an interpretation of each, and a read on the gap between self-knowledge and value alignment — the distance between those two is usually where the discomfort you came here about is located.
All three are scored so higher is favorable, with the interpretation noting that maximum consistency across all contexts is not the goal and can shade into social inflexibility.
Where these questions came from
Authenticity research
Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., & Joseph, S. (2008). The authentic personality: A theoretical and empirical conceptualization. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(3), 385–399.
This version: An original 15-item scale drawing on the authenticity literature, scored across three sub-dimensions. Not a published instrument.
For self-reflection and education. No account is required and your answers are not shared.
Common questions
What does it mean to be authentic?
In the research sense, three things at once: knowing your own values and preferences, acting in line with them, and not systematically presenting a version of yourself you know to be false. It does not require behaving identically in every setting — adjusting how you communicate to your audience is ordinary skill. The line falls at adjusting what you claim to believe.
Is it inauthentic to act differently at work than at home?
No. Everyone shifts register between contexts, and the ability to do so is a social competence, not a betrayal. What matters is whether the shift stays at the level of tone and formality or extends to your positions and values. This test separates cross-context consistency from value alignment for exactly that reason.
Why do I know my values but not follow them?
Because values are abstract and decisions are concrete, and in the moment the concrete cost of acting on a value is vivid while the benefit is diffuse. The gap between stated values and revealed preferences is close to universal; what varies is its size and whether you notice. Noticing is what makes it addressable.
Does authenticity relate to wellbeing?
Consistently, in the research. Higher measured authenticity is associated with greater life satisfaction and lower anxiety, and the relationship holds after controlling for self-esteem. The likely mechanism is straightforward: sustained self-presentation is effortful, and the effort accumulates.