Wellington vs PrinciplesYou

What does PrinciplesYou offer?

PrinciplesYou is an online personality assessment published by Principles, the company founded by the investor Ray Dalio. At the time of writing its help centre states that there is no cost associated with the assessment and that it is free for all individual users. An account is optional: you can answer anonymously, or create a profile with an email address or a social login so you can come back to your results later. When you finish you are taken to a results page and can download a PDF.

The result is not a single label. At the time of writing the results FAQ describes a report built in layers.

• Trait scales and facets. Fifteen trait scales, each made of three facets. The examples the FAQ gives are Creative, with the facets Originality, Curiosity and Nonconformity, and Leadership, with Demanding, Taking Charge and Inspiring. Facet scores are shown as percentiles against what Principles calls its norm group of over 3,000 people.
• Three orientations. The scales are grouped under Cognitive, Interpersonal and Motivational headings: how you think, how you deal with people, what drives you.
• Archetypes. You are given a top archetype and up to two others, drawn from a set that includes Advocates, Architects, Creators, Enthusiasts, Fighters, Givers, Individualists, Leaders, Producers and Seekers, and placed on a picture the report calls the Archetype Archipelago.

By its own description the instrument is built on Big Five style traits rather than on types. Principles' published account of the research says the assessment was developed with the psychologists Brian R. Little and Adam Grant, that its item pool was modelled on public-domain personality item banks of the kind used to measure the Big Five, and that it was examined in a sample of more than 3,000 adults with a two-week retest, and that average internal consistency was about .85 for the traits and about .74 for the facets. Publishing those numbers at all puts Principles ahead of most free consumer tests.

The framing is work. The language is about collaboration and roles, Principles sells a separate product for organisations, and the report is written with colleagues in mind even when you take it alone.

What does Wellington offer?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

There is one assessment, and it grows. The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes and scores 6 broad dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Each comes back as a percentile against a reference sample, one of three bands, and a written page for that band. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. No card is needed.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait: 336 further questions that take the report to 90 traits, including every Big Five facet and all 24 character strengths from the standard classification (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), with domain overviews, a strengths constellation, a growth plan and a downloadable PDF, then adds a short weekly module that carries the report toward 255 traits across eight domains over 104 weeks, with retests in year two. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring or selection, and users can export and delete their data.

Where do PrinciplesYou and Wellington agree?

On the thing that matters most. Both report continuous scores rather than sorting you into a box, and both express those scores as a position against a reference sample rather than as a raw number nobody can interpret.

Both also build a layer of narrower facets under the broad scales, which is the right instinct. Facets add bandwidth and predictive power that domain scores alone miss (Soto & John, 2017), and they are the difference between knowing that you are conscientious and knowing whether that shows up as tidiness or as drive.

And both inherit the limits of any questionnaire. A self-report knows what you are willing to say about yourself on the day, and it is steadier when each score rests on several statements rather than one. Very short measures understate how much traits matter and inflate the apparent importance of whatever else is being measured, with single-item scales the worst offenders (Credé et al., 2012). The five-factor structure both instruments lean on holds up in ratings by people who know the person as well as in self-reports (McCrae & Costa, 1987).

Where do they differ?

• A sixth dimension. Wellington reports Honesty-Humility as one of its six headline dimensions, the factor that lexical studies in several languages recovered alongside the Big Five (Ashton & Lee, 2007). PrinciplesYou organises its scales around work-relevant labels of its own rather than around the five or six standard dimension names, so sincerity, modesty and fairness are not gathered into a single reported factor.
• Character strengths inside a trait report. The 24 strengths of the standard classification (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) sit in the Wellington Membership next to the facets, so a strength is read against a trait. PrinciplesYou reports strengths implicitly, through the scales you score high on.
• Written pages per band. Every Wellington trait has three pages, one per band, written in advance by the writing and psychology team. Your answers choose which page you read, rather than a paragraph being assembled around a label.
• One sitting versus a year. PrinciplesYou is a single sitting with a report you can return to. Wellington keeps going: the membership reaches every facet and character strength, then adds a weekly module across the year, then retests that show movement.
• Who the report is addressed to. PrinciplesYou is written with teams and colleagues in the room. Wellington is written for the person who took it.

The familiar types-versus-traits argument does not apply here, because neither product reports a type. Both do name you, PrinciplesYou with an archetype and Wellington with a Portrait, and in both cases the name travels while the numbers underneath are the measurement. The trait structure both are drawing on came out of decades of lexical research rather than one study, and survived repeated attempts to replace it (Goldberg, 1993).

Side by side

Wellington scores each trait from several statements on a 5-point accuracy scale and places it against a reference sample. Those norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the methods page says so. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. The methodology is public.

Questions people ask

Is PrinciplesYou free?

At the time of writing, yes. Its help centre says there is no cost associated with the assessment for individual users. You can answer anonymously or create a profile with an email address or a social login, which is what lets you return to your results later, and you can download a PDF of the report when you finish.

Is PrinciplesYou based on the Big Five?

By its own description it is built on Big Five style traits. Principles says its item pool was modelled on public-domain personality item banks of the kind used to measure the five factors, and it reports continuous trait and facet scores as percentiles. It labels its scales with names of its own rather than with the five dimension names, so the mapping is a reading rather than a stated equivalence.

Which should I take?

Both are free to start, so this is a cheap decision. If your question is about work, teams and how colleagues read you, PrinciplesYou is written for exactly that and gives you facet percentiles for nothing. If your question is about yourself across more than work, and you want 6 dimensions including Honesty-Humility with a band and a percentile for each band, start with the free Wellington Snapshot.

How much does Wellington cost?

The Snapshot is free and needs an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. The Wellington Membership is $4.99 a month, cancel any time, and adds the facets and the 24 character strengths.