Character strengths: Peterson and Seligman's classification

Where the model comes from

In the early 2000s Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman led a project to do for human qualities something like what diagnostic manuals do for disorders: build a shared classification. The team reviewed philosophical and religious texts from several traditions and found six recurring virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence (Dahlsgaard, Peterson & Seligman, 2005).

The outcome was the book "Character Strengths and Virtues" (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), which describes 24 strengths spread across those virtues, such as curiosity, bravery, kindness, fairness, self-regulation and gratitude. To make the list, a strength had to meet several criteria, including being valued in its own right and not diminishing others.

What the research says

The strengths have been studied in hundreds of thousands of people across many countries. A recurring finding is that some strengths, such as hope, zest, gratitude, love and curiosity, relate more strongly to life satisfaction than others (Park, Peterson & Seligman, 2004). The most and least endorsed strengths look similar across cultures.

The theoretical structure is the weakest point. Factor analyses don't reproduce the six virtues; the data fit better with three to five factors, such as a caring dimension, an intellectual curiosity dimension and a self-control dimension (McGrath, 2015). Interventions built on using your strengths in new ways show positive effects, usually modest ones.

Criticisms and debates

Critics note that the list mixes personality traits, values and skills, and that the choice of 24 strengths reflects a particular cultural perspective despite the effort to be broad. There is also debate about whether "signature strengths" should be identified as each person's highest-ranked ones or compared against population norms.

Limitations

The original research questionnaire uses hundreds of agreement-scale items. Ethea's test uses forced-choice blocks, so it shows the relative order of the 24 strengths within you, not the absolute level of each one. Because each strength appears only four times, scores are coarse: a one- or two-point gap between neighbouring strengths in the ranking is not meaningful. The test has not been validated in independent samples.

How Ethea adapts the model

Ethea's version has 24 blocks of four statements; in each block you mark the most and the least like you, and every strength appears exactly four times. The format fits the model's idea of "signature strengths": finding what's most characteristic of you rather than grading everything. The result highlights your top strengths and groups them under the classic virtues, purely as a way to organize them.

Test created by Giovanni Oliveira.

Ethea is not affiliated with the institute that maintains the official character strengths survey or with the authors of the classification.

References

Links with a DOI go to the original article. Where no DOI is given, the link opens a Google Scholar search.

1. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. American Psychological Association / Oxford University Press. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
2. Dahlsgaard, K., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Shared virtue: The convergence of valued human strengths across culture and history. Review of General Psychology, 9(3), 203–213. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
3. Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603–619. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
4. McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407–424. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
5. Hicks, L. E. (1970). Some properties of ipsative, normative, and forced-choice normative measures. Psychological Bulletin, 74(3), 167–184. DOI: 10.1037/h0029780(opens in a new tab)
6. Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(3), 460–502. DOI: 10.1177/0013164410375112(opens in a new tab)
7. Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2013). How IRT can solve problems of ipsative data in forced-choice questionnaires. Psychological Methods, 18(1), 36–52. DOI: 10.1037/a0030641(opens in a new tab)