How Opinion DNA was built
Opinion DNA is the product of three years of development with academic psychologists and behavioral scientists. Here is where it came from, what it measures, and how your answers become your profile.
Where it came from
During 2020, our team interviewed more than sixty experts in personality psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and cognition with one question in mind: what actually drives the way people see the world? The answer kept coming back in three parts. Stable personality traits matter, but they are only one layer. Values — what people hold to be important and sacred — do much of the work traits get credit for. And underneath both sits a third layer almost no assessment measures: how people form and hold beliefs in the first place.
Over the following three years, working in consultation with academic psychologists and behavioral scientists from Royal Holloway, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, City University, and NYU, that research program became Opinion DNA: a single assessment that maps all three layers. The thinking behind it is told in full in Why We Think What We Think by Opinion DNA co-founder Turi Munthe, published by Penguin.
The three layers
Personality — 12 dimensions
The traits psychology measures best: the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), the Dark Triad measured as subclinical trait continua, plus emotional regulation styles, mortality concern, and life satisfaction. These draw on the most replicated findings in trait psychology.
Values — 24 dimensions
What you hold to matter, drawn from four research traditions: moral foundations (the intuitions behind moral judgment), cooperative virtues (the morality-as-cooperation research program), basic personal values (the tradition founded by Shalom Schwartz), and social orientation. Values predict decisions, politics, and conflict better than personality traits alone.
Meta-Thinking — 12 dimensions
Opinion DNA’s differentiator: not what you believe, but how. Dogmatism, need for cognition, intolerance for uncertainty, intellectual humility, teleology, just-world belief, subjective numeracy, anthropomorphism — and your four primal world beliefs (whether the world feels alive, enticing, safe, and good), a research program from the University of Pennsylvania.
Every dimension is grounded in peer-reviewed psychometric research — established constructs with decades of literature behind them, not categories we invented. Explore all 48 dimensions →
From questions to scores
The assessment is 179 statements answered on an agree–disagree scale, taking 10–15 minutes. Your answers are scored into 48 continuous dimensions, each on a 0–100 scale. We deliberately avoid types and labels: a type system has to throw away the difference between a 52 and a 95 on the same trait, which is often exactly the information that matters. Each score is shown alongside the population average, so you always see where you sit relative to other people — not against an arbitrary midpoint.
Your progress saves automatically after every answer, and your scores are yours to revisit for life.
The AI-written report
Scores tell you where you stand; the report tells you what it means. AI analyzes your specific combination of 48 scores — the interactions, not each number in isolation — and writes a personal report covering your life and happiness, your relationships, your career, and your Cognitive Signature: how you form opinions, where your thinking has blind spots, and how you handle disagreement. Two people with the same Openness score get different reports, because the rest of their profiles differ.
What Opinion DNA is — and isn’t
Opinion DNA is a map of how your mind works: your traits, your values, and your thinking patterns, measured against the population. It is not a clinical instrument, and no score on any dimension is a diagnosis. It is a snapshot built from your honest answers — the better the input, the better the map.
Frequently asked questions
Is Opinion DNA scientifically valid?
Opinion DNA was developed over three years in consultation with academic psychologists and behavioral scientists from Royal Holloway, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, City University, and NYU. Each of the 48 dimensions is grounded in peer-reviewed psychometric research — established constructs like the Big Five, moral foundations, basic human values, and primal world beliefs — rather than invented categories.
How is this different from MBTI or other type-based tests?
Opinion DNA doesn't sort you into a type. Every dimension is a continuous 0-100 score, which preserves the information type systems throw away — the difference between scoring 52 and 95 on the same trait. It also measures three layers (personality, values, and meta-thinking) where most tests measure only one.
Is Opinion DNA a clinical or diagnostic tool?
No. Opinion DNA measures trait continua in the general population. A score on any dimension — including Neuroticism or the Dark Triad traits — describes where you sit relative to other people, not a diagnosis. If you have concerns about your mental health, speak to a qualified professional.
Where do the population averages come from?
Every score in your profile is shown next to a population average for that dimension, so you can see where you sit relative to others who have taken the assessment. The averages update as more people complete Opinion DNA.
How does the AI report work?
Once your 48 scores are calculated, AI analyzes your specific combination — not each score in isolation — and writes a personal report covering your life and happiness, relationships, career, and Cognitive Signature. The scores themselves come from your answers, not from AI; the AI's job is interpretation and synthesis.
Ready to discover your 48-dimension profile?
Personality, values, and meta-thinking — mapped across 48 dimensions with an AI-generated personal report. Built with 60+ experts from Oxford, Cambridge, NYU, and UPenn.
Start My Assessment — $47One-time purchase. Lifetime access. 30-day money-back guarantee.