Guides · Strengths & values
The VIA Survey ranks 24 character strengths — things like curiosity, fairness, humour and perseverance — from your strongest to your least used. It takes about 15 minutes, the ranked result is free, and it is run by the non-profit VIA Institute on Character.
We have not built our own version of it, deliberately. The real survey is 96 items or more, it is the instrument the research was done on, and a twenty-question imitation would be worse than the free original. This page explains what it measures and sends you to the actual thing.
Take the official VIA Survey →
viacharacter.org · free ranked result · paid reports optional
What it measures
The classification came out of an attempt by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman to do the opposite of a diagnostic manual — to catalogue what is right with people rather than what is wrong. They published it in 2004 as Character Strengths and Virtues, after surveying which qualities are valued across cultures and history.
Six virtues, 24 strengths:
Creativity · Curiosity · Judgment · Love of learning · Perspective
Bravery · Perseverance · Honesty · Zest
Love · Kindness · Social intelligence
Teamwork · Fairness · Leadership
Forgiveness · Humility · Prudence · Self-regulation
Appreciation of beauty · Gratitude · Hope · Humour · Spirituality
Practicalities
The survey itself is free and returns your 24 strengths in rank order, which is the part most people want. It takes roughly 15 minutes. You create an account, which is how your result is saved.
Paid reports sit on top of that — deeper write-ups of your top strengths and how to apply them. The free ranking is enough for most purposes, and you can decide about the rest afterwards.
Your top five are usually called signature strengths: the ones that feel like you rather than like effort. That distinction is the useful part of the whole framework. A strength you have to summon is not the same as one you have to restrain.
Honest limits
Mixed, and better than most things in this space. The survey has been used in a great deal of published research and its reliability is reasonable. What is contested is the structure: the six-virtue grouping has not held up consistently when tested statistically, and several analyses recover three or four factors rather than six. The 24 strengths are useful; the tidy hierarchy above them is the shakier part.
It is also entirely self-report, and the ranking is ipsative — it tells you how your strengths compare with each other, not how they compare with other people’s. Being last in humility does not mean you are the least humble person in the room. It means humility is the strength you lean on least.
And there is a ceiling problem: almost nobody rates themselves low on things like kindness or fairness, so the bottom of the ranking is compressed and less informative than the top.
A ranked list of 24 strengths is a good description and a poor instruction. Knowing curiosity is your top strength does not tell you whether the problem this year is your work, your relationships, or your health — and the same strength plays very differently depending on which.
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