What is tolerance?

What does tolerance mean?

In ordinary use the word does two jobs: tolerance in the mechanical sense, the variation a system can take, and tolerance in the human sense, which is the one measured here. The plain definition is this: you can accept and respect people who think, look, or live differently from you. Compressed further, it is the steady capacity to let people be different from you without needing to fix or flee them.

The behaviour it describes is specific. Someone tells you about a way of living that is not yours, and nothing in you moves to correct it, convert them or leave the room. Disagreement is compatible with the trait. What marks a high scorer is that difference itself does not register as a threat or a task.

It is not approval, and treating it as approval is the commonest misreading. A tolerant person can hold firm views about what is right and still not require the person in front of them to share them. Nor is it indifference. Indifference does not notice; tolerance notices and makes room anyway.

Which personality dimension is tolerance part of?

Tolerance sits beneath Openness to Experience and borders on Agreeableness. The Openness part is receptivity to unfamiliar values, customs and ways of thinking. The Agreeableness part is warmth and lack of hostility toward the person carrying them. Only the first would be an anthropologist's interest in difference; only the second would be general niceness. Tolerance needs both, which is why it reads as a blend.

Established inventories place it in different rooms of the same house. The NEO inventories cover the receptivity side with the Openness facet Values, readiness to re-examine social, political and religious values, and the warmth side under Agreeableness (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The BFI-2 renames Openness as Open-Mindedness and organises Agreeableness into Compassion, Respectfulness and Trust (Soto & John, 2017), and between the domains and their facets sit ten aspects, including Openness, Intellect, Compassion and Politeness (DeYoung et al., 2007). Older omnibus inventories carried a scale under exactly this name, including the Jackson Personality Inventory and the California Psychological Inventory, and the public-domain IPIP pools include an AB5C facet named Understanding that loads on both Agreeableness and Openness (Goldberg et al., 2006).

Wellington scores it from the IPIP AB5C Understanding facet and items in the style of the older Tolerance scales. It is one of 13 traits reported beneath Openness to Experience; the hierarchy is in the Big Five facets, explained.

How is tolerance different from open-mindedness?

Open-mindedness is the neighbour this is confused with most, and the difference is the object. Open-mindedness is about ideas and your own position: you will revise what you believe when the case against it is good. Tolerance is about people: you let someone else believe and live differently without hostility. One is what you do to your own views, the other is what you do about theirs.

They separate in both directions. A person can be very tolerant and quite closed: at ease with a neighbour whose politics are the reverse of theirs, and not about to reconsider their own. A person can be very open-minded and impatient: delighted to follow an argument anywhere, and sharp with anyone whose reasoning is sloppy. The other close neighbour is cooperation, a facet of Agreeableness, which is about working with people and avoiding needless friction. Cooperation shows up when there is a shared task; tolerance shows up when there is no task at all and the other person is simply different from you.

What does high tolerance look like?

High scorers make room for people without announcing that they are doing it.

• Your friends do not all think the same way, and you would find it dull if they did.
• People tell you things they do not tell others, because you do not flinch.
• You can hold a strong position and still be easy to sit next to.

The costs are worth naming. Making room for everything makes it harder to say where your own line is, and people sometimes need to know. Tolerance can shade into leaving bad behaviour unchallenged, a cost paid by whoever is on the receiving end rather than by you. And a person who accommodates every way of doing things can find their own preferences quietly disappearing from the arrangements.

What does low tolerance look like?

Low scorers are not necessarily hostile. They are people with a settled sense of how things are done, who find difference effortful rather than interesting.

• You know what you value and you do not adjust it to the room.
• Your standards are legible, and people know what they are getting.
• You are loyal to what is yours, and that loyalty is not conditional.

The costs run the other way. A smaller circle means fewer chances to be surprised by someone, and first impressions of unfamiliar people harden faster when there is less contact to revise them. Disagreement that always becomes a contest costs relationships worth keeping. And other people often see how we come across better than we do, so a person at this end may be read as sharper than they feel (Vazire, 2010).

What does the research say about tolerance?

This facet has less direct evidence than most, so it is worth separating the well-supported from the plausible.

• Where it comes from. The trait is a blend, drawing receptivity to unfamiliar values from Openness and low hostility from Agreeableness, both measured directly in the Big Five (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Soto & John, 2017).
• Structure that holds up. The five-factor structure reproduced in observer ratings from fifty cultures (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005), and self-report profiles across fifty-six nations show the same dimensions (Schmitt et al., 2007).
• Why facets are reported at all. Narrower traits add bandwidth and predictive power beyond the domain scores above them (Soto & John, 2017). A trait that blends two domains is one a single domain score handles poorly.
• Age. Across 92 longitudinal samples Agreeableness changed mainly in old age, while Openness rose in adolescence and fell again in old age (Roberts et al., 2006). A cross-sectional sample of 132,515 adults aged twenty-one to sixty found Agreeableness still rising through early and middle adulthood (Srivastava et al., 2003), so the two ingredients of this facet do not move together over a life.
• Change. Trait change through intervention is real and modest, about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017).

One honest limit: tolerance is among the traits people most want to score well on, and a self-report cannot check that wish. Read the score as a description of how difference usually feels to you, not as a measure of how you behave when it counts.

How does Wellington measure tolerance?

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.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, across six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility, and reports Openness to Experience as a whole rather than its facets. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. There is no card.

Tolerance itself is measured by 8 statements on the same scale, and it is reported in the Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, to reach 90 traits including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, then a weekly module over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits.

Your score is the average of those statements, set against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. 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. Each band has its own page, written in advance by the writing and psychology team: Quiet is The Home Ground (You know what you stand for, and you stand there), Balanced is The Open Gate (You give people room, and you keep a few walls), High is The Wide Table (You make room at the table without moving anyone's chair). The methodology walks through a worked example and the scoring in full.

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 built for hiring or selection, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Can tolerance change?

Yes, modestly, and through contact and habit rather than resolve. A systematic review of intervention studies found real trait change, about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, largest for Emotional Stability, and drawn mostly from therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). Among people who wanted to change a trait, measured change followed over sixteen weeks, and those who set specific if-then plans changed more than those given general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Does tolerance mean agreeing with everything?

No. Tolerance is the capacity to let someone else think, look and live differently without hostility. It does not require you to think they are right, and high scorers often hold firm views of their own. What changes at the high end is that disagreement does not need to become a contest, and difference does not register as a threat.

How is tolerance different from open-mindedness?

Open-mindedness is about ideas: your willingness to revise your own position when the case against it is good. Tolerance is about people: your capacity to accept how others believe and live. They come apart in both directions. Someone can be entirely at ease with a neighbour whose views are the reverse of theirs while being completely unwilling to reconsider their own.

Is a low tolerance score a bad result?

No. It describes a settled sense of how things are done and a preference for the familiar in people as well as customs, which underpins loyalty, consistency and the keeping of traditions. The cost is a smaller circle and first impressions that harden with less contact to revise them. It describes what difference feels like to you, not your character.