24-question perfectionism test scoring strivings, concerns and socially-prescribed perfectionism separately. No single combined score.
Perfectionism Test
Twenty-four statements, about three minutes. You will get three separate scores: perfectionistic strivings, perfectionistic concerns, and socially prescribed perfectionism. There is no total — high standards and fear of mistakes behave almost oppositely in the research, and averaging them is precisely the mistake the popular version makes.
Almost all of perfectionism's association with anxiety, burnout and procrastination is carried by concerns. Strivings carry almost none of it. That is exactly why this test refuses to give you one number.
How the Perfectionism Test Works
Answer as you generally are, not as you would like to be
This is the only instruction that really matters here, because the bias on this test does not run in one direction. "I set high standards for myself" is flattering — close to a job-interview answer — so that scale gets pushed up. "I am frightened of mistakes and hard on myself" is unflattering, so that scale gets pushed down. For a test whose whole point is the gap between the two, that is the worst possible combination, which is why it is the first thing we say.
Rate 24 statements
Eight per scale, four worded each way within every scale. The balance is there to defeat straight-line answering: agree with all 24 and every scale lands exactly on the midpoint of 24, and the page will tell you so.
Read the three scores separately
Each is a sum of eight items on a published 8–40 scale, not a percentile. They are never added together and never will be — strivings and concerns behave almost oppositely in the research, so an average would destroy the result.
Read the shape, not any one bar
High strivings with low concerns is the profile the literature treats as adaptive: exacting standards without the self-punishment. The cost lives in concerns, and concerns can be high even when strivings are not. The relationship between the three bars is the actual result.
About Perfectionism — the Science, Honestly Told
Where the Three Scales Come From
Perfectionism was taken apart in two stages. The first was Hewitt and Flett in 1991, who argued that demanding perfection of yourself and believing that other people demand it of you are not the same thing, and that the second needs measuring in its own right — which is where this test's third scale comes from. Around the same time Frost and colleagues (1990) split perfectionism along a different seam, into concern over mistakes, personal standards, parental expectations and related components. The second stage happened when those scales were factor-analysed together, and two higher-order factors kept coming out: strivings, meaning exacting personal standards, and concerns, meaning fear of mistakes, doubt about your own work and self-punishment after a shortfall. That two-factor structure is the published finding about the construct, and it is the entire reason this test has three scales instead of one number. We report socially prescribed perfectionism as its own bar rather than folding it into concerns because it is the facet most consistently linked to harm, and because it describes a perceived environment as much as it describes a person.
The twenty-four statements you will rate are an original RECATOOLS item set: eight per scale, four keyed each way, with the scoring published openly on this page. We wrote our own because the established measures are unavailable to us. The MPS is distributed by the authors' own lab for use in research only, with clinical and consulting use routed to Multi-Health Systems Inc.; the Frost scale is journal-controlled with no commercial grant locatable from a primary source. Our standing rule treats a licence that would need an email to confirm as unlicensed rather than pending. Constructs are not copyrightable; item text is, so we rewrote the items. That honesty runs both ways: the constructs are well studied, but our specific items have no validation study, no reliability coefficient and no norm group, which is why this test only ever reports a position on the published 8–40 scale and never a percentile.
"Averaging high standards together with fear of mistakes throws away the only useful information this test produces."
What the Research Does and Does Not Support
Three things worth carrying. First, the two higher-order factors behave almost oppositely: concerns carry essentially all of the association with anxiety, depressive symptoms, burnout and procrastination, while strivings, once concerns are statistically held constant, are roughly neutral to positive and sit alongside conscientiousness, endurance and achievement. Second, perfectionism is adjacent to Big Five conscientiousness without being it: conscientiousness is organised, dependable follow-through, and perfectionism adds an evaluative standard on top plus, in its concerns half, a punitive response to falling short — high conscientiousness with low perfectionistic concerns is a common and comfortable profile. Third, and most important: this page cannot diagnose anything. Those associations are found at the level of populations in large samples; they are not evidence about any individual reader. If this pattern is causing real distress, that is worth talking to someone about, and it is a separate question from the numbers this test produced.
The Three Scales
Perfectionistic strivings
You set the bar above where anyone else set it, keep refining after the work would already have passed, and find precision satisfying in its own right. This is the ambitious half, and on its own it carries no cost.
Perfectionistic concerns
Fear of mistakes, doubt about the quality of what you produced, and a harsh reckoning after falling short. This is the half that costs, and it is not the same thing as having high standards.
Socially prescribed perfectionism
The sense that other people require flawlessness of you and that their regard tracks your performance. This scale describes a reading of your environment as much as it describes you.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Because perfectionism is not one thing. When the multidimensional perfectionism scales are factor-analysed together, two higher-order factors come out reliably: strivings (exacting personal standards) and concerns (fear of mistakes, self-doubt, self-punishment after a shortfall). They relate to completely different outcomes — concerns carry essentially all of the association with anxiety, depressive symptoms, burnout and procrastination, while strivings are roughly neutral to positive once concerns are held constant. A total averages two opposite things and reproduces exactly the error the field spent thirty years correcting. The concrete reason is sharper still: the adaptive high-strivings, low-concerns profile averages out to a middling number identical to a mediocre-everything profile. Our scoring kernel returns no total.
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No. These three scales describe where tendencies sit on a published scale; they are not judgements about you. A high strivings score describes the standard you hold your own work to. It has nothing to do with distress and the items were written to keep distress out — high strivings with low concerns is a good combination, and the page says so plainly rather than hedging. A high concerns score describes your relationship with your own mistakes; it does carry a real cost, and it is also a functioning quality-control system that catches things. A high socially prescribed score often describes an environment as much as a person. Description and verdict are different things, and this page only does the first.
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No, and there is no softer way to put it. Perfectionistic concerns and socially prescribed perfectionism are studied in relation to anxiety, depressive symptoms and burnout — associations found at the level of populations, across samples of thousands. This is not a screen, not an indicator, and not evidence about you of that kind. A 24-item questionnaire answered in a browser cannot do that. One more thing worth saying plainly: if this pattern is causing you real distress rather than ordinary annoyance at yourself, that is worth talking to someone about. It is a separate question from what this test put on the screen, and it does not need a number to justify it.
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To catch straight-line answering. Some people tend to agree with statements regardless of content, or to disagree with all of them, and on a one-directional scale that habit becomes a score. With four items keyed each way in every scale, the habit cancels itself out: agree with all 24 and all three scales land exactly on the midpoint of 24. The page tells you when it detects this, because it means the result is not worth much. The reversed items are also not negations of the forward ones — each is an independently written statement of the low end, because "I do X" and "I don't do X" makes the reversal transparent and the balance useless.
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RECATOOLS did — twenty-four original statements, with the scoring rule published openly on this page and an authorship attestation in the tool's provenance record confirming that no existing perfectionism instrument's item text was consulted, opened, paraphrased or adapted. Why we wrote our own: the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Hewitt & Flett, 1991) is distributed by the authors' own lab for use in research only, with clinical and consulting use routed to Multi-Health Systems Inc.; the Frost scale (1990) is journal-controlled and no commercial grant was locatable from a primary source. Our standing rule treats a licence that needs an email to confirm as unlicensed rather than pending. Constructs are not copyrightable; item text is. So we rewrote the items.
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No. Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and are never uploaded or stored by RECATOOLS. While a test is in progress they are held in your browser's local storage so you can close the tab and resume, and they are cleared when you finish. We cannot see what you selected, and no answer ever leaves your device. Viewing pages on this site works like any other website and is covered by our Privacy Policy.
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Yes. These tendencies are relatively stable in adulthood but not fixed, and a self-report questionnaire also picks up your current state — exam season, an appraisal cycle, the week after a piece of criticism will all move the numbers, particularly on concerns and socially prescribed. The socially prescribed scale in particular tracks your circumstances: changing jobs or leaving an environment can drop it substantially, which is exactly what you would expect from a scale about perceived external demand. This item set also has no test-retest reliability study, so we cannot tell you how stable its results are. Treat it as a snapshot.
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Related, but not the same, and worth being precise about. Conscientiousness describes organised, dependable follow-through: you plan, you finish, you can be relied on. It is about how you operate. Perfectionism adds an evaluative standard on top of that — not just that the work gets done but that it has to reach a particular bar — and the concerns scale adds a punitive response to falling short of it. The socially prescribed scale adds something conscientiousness has nothing to say about: whose standard it is. A highly conscientious person with low perfectionistic concerns is a common and comfortable profile — thorough, reliable, and genuinely untroubled when something ships imperfect. That combination is invisible to a test that only asks how organised you are. Take the Big Five test to learn how you operate; take this one for what happens around the standard.
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On the current research, it is the most comfortable of the shapes this test can produce: exacting standards without the self-punishment. This page is not going to turn around and tell you it is a problem — high standards are not a pathology, and separating strivings from concerns is precisely how the field stopped describing them as one. The single caveat is response bias. The strivings items are flattering and get endorsed easily; the concerns items are unflattering and get shaved. Both biases widen the gap in the direction that reads better. So treat this result as the most optimistic reading consistent with your answers, and check it against how the last shortfall actually felt.
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Because it is the facet most consistently linked to poorer outcomes across studies, and because it is a different kind of thing from the other two: it describes a perceived environment as much as a person. It is also the one scale here whose answer may not be located in you — if the score comes mostly from one relationship, one workplace or one phase of life, that is situational, and situations are more changeable than temperaments. Note carefully what the scale cannot do: every item asked what you believe other people require of you, and not one of them could check. A high score is consistent with an environment that genuinely operates that way and with one that does not while being read as though it does. We cannot separate those and will not pretend to.
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