Perfectionism Test

Perfectionistic strivings in one paragraph

A higher score here describes someone who sets the bar for their own work above where anyone else set it, and who gets something out of hitting it. You aim past the requirement. You keep adjusting after the thing would already have passed. Precision is not only a means to an end — getting the details exactly right is satisfying on its own terms. This is the component of perfectionism that carries the ambition and, on its own, not the cost. Nothing on this scale asked whether you fear mistakes, doubt what you produced, or punish yourself afterwards. Those questions were asked, and counted somewhere else, deliberately. A high number in this bar describes your standards, not your peace of mind.

How this result was measured

Eight of the twenty-four statements measured this scale — four worded towards it, four worded away and reverse-scored, so agreeing with everything cannot manufacture a high score. Each answer contributes 1 to 5, for a range of 8 to 40, and we cut that published range into thirds: 18 and below lower, 19 to 29 middle, 30 and above higher. Those are positions on our scale, not percentiles. There is no norm sample behind this test, so we cannot tell you where you sit relative to other people, and we would rather say so than invent a figure.

Note carefully what this scale does not measure. It does not measure distress, and the items were written to keep distress out. It does not measure how much you fear getting things wrong, how long a shortfall stays with you, or whether you believe other people require flawlessness of you — those belong to the other two scales, and a high score here tells you nothing about them. It also does not measure how much you achieve. Standards are what you aim at; results depend on time, resources and luck that a questionnaire knows nothing about.

There is deliberately no total on this test and no combined perfectionism score. That absence is the point of the tool rather than an omission, for reasons set out below.

What it looks like day to day

You reopen the file after sending it, not out of anxiety but because you thought of a better way to say the third paragraph. You have a private version of the brief that is more demanding than the one you were given, and you work to that one. You notice the column that is one pixel out, the inconsistent date format, the sentence that is technically true and slightly misleading. Given a choice between finishing early and finishing properly, you find early strangely unsatisfying — there is a small, real pleasure in the thing being exactly right that other people appear not to feel.

You probably also do this where nobody is grading. The way the pantry is arranged. How a spreadsheet looks when only you will ever open it. That is the tell that this is a disposition rather than a response to pressure: it shows up where there is no audience and no consequence.

What high strivings do not look like, necessarily, is misery. If your concerns bar is low, the picture is usually a person who aims high, enjoys the aiming, misses sometimes, notes it, and carries on. That combination is common and it is not a problem in need of a solution.

Where it helps and where it costs

It helps in every domain where the difference between competent and excellent is visible to somebody. Craft work, code, drafting, design, surgery, translation, teaching — anything where the last ten per cent is where the value sits. High standards are also durable in a way motivation is not: they keep operating on the days you do not feel like it, because the standard is external to your mood. Strivings track conscientiousness, and they show up in the research alongside sustained effort, achievement and — worth saying, because it surprises people — better rather than worse wellbeing once concerns are held constant.

The cost is not psychological. It is arithmetic. A standard set above the requirement is paid for in hours, and the hours come out of something. The predictable failure is spending your last-ten-per-cent effort on the wrong ten per cent: making the internal deck beautiful while the thing that actually mattered went out unchecked. The second cost is other people's time, when a standard you hold for yourself becomes one you enforce on a team that did not agree to it. The third is knowing when to stop, which is genuinely difficult if the satisfaction is in the refining rather than in the finishing.

All three of those are scheduling problems. They are real, they respond to planning, and they are a different order of thing from what a high concerns score describes.

What the research does and does not support

The finding this whole tool is built on is that perfectionism is not one thing. When the multidimensional perfectionism scales are factor-analysed together, two higher-order factors come out reliably: strivings, which is what this page is about, and concerns. They behave differently. Strivings correlate with conscientiousness, with endurance at difficult tasks and with achievement, and once you statistically hold concerns constant, strivings are roughly neutral to positive on every wellbeing measure people have looked at. Concerns carry essentially all of the association with anxiety, depressive symptoms, burnout and — counterintuitively — procrastination.

That is why the popular version of this test is wrong. "How much of a perfectionist are you", answered with a single number, averages a broadly benign disposition together with a costly one and reports the mean as though it meant something. Two people with the same total can have opposite profiles. So this test reports three separate bars and never adds them up.

This scale also sits close to Big Five conscientiousness without being the same thing, which is worth being precise about if you have taken both tests. Conscientiousness describes organised, dependable follow-through: you plan, you finish, you can be relied on. It is about how you operate. Perfectionistic strivings add an evaluative standard on top of that — not just that the work gets done, but that it has to reach a particular bar — and concerns adds what happens when it does not. A highly conscientious person with low perfectionistic concerns is a common and comfortable profile: thorough, reliable, and genuinely untroubled when something ships imperfect. That is the reason these are two tools rather than one.

What the research does not support is the inverse error, which this page will also avoid: that strivings are the "good perfectionism" and therefore free. They are strongly associated with concerns in practice — most people who aim high also worry about missing — and the clean, high-strivings-only profile is a minority, not a default. If your concerns bar is also high, read that page; it is describing the part that costs.

Four things worth doing

1. Read this bar against your concerns bar, not on its own. High strivings with low concerns is the profile the literature treats as adaptive. If that is what your two bars show, there is nothing here to fix. If concerns is also high, that is where the useful information is.
2. Decide in advance which ten per cent gets the extra effort. Name the part of the work where excellence will actually be noticed, and the part where meeting the requirement is the correct answer. The standard is not the problem; the standard applied uniformly is.
3. Set a stopping rule before you begin. A time box, a version number, a person who receives it on a date. High strivings rarely produce a natural finish line, so it has to be installed rather than waited for.
4. Do not enforce your standard silently. If you hold work to a bar the team was not told about, they experience it as unpredictable rejection rather than as quality. Say the standard out loud at the start, or apply it only to your own share.

The honest caveat

Bias on this scale runs in a specific and unhelpful direction. "I set high standards for myself" is close to a job-interview answer — it is a flattering thing to say about yourself and it costs nothing to endorse — so strivings scores on any self-report tend to be pushed up. On this same test, the concerns items are unflattering in exactly the way these are flattering, so those scores tend to be pushed down. That is the worst possible combination for a test whose whole point is the gap between the two: both biases widen that gap in the direction that reads better. If your result showed high strivings and low concerns, treat it as the most optimistic reading consistent with your answers rather than as a finding, and check it against how the last shortfall actually felt.

Beyond that, the standard limits: original items on a well-studied construct, with no validation studies of their own and no norm sample. This is a vocabulary for self-reflection, not a measurement, and not a diagnosis of anything.

From the RECATOOLS Perfectionism item set — an original 24-item composition over the public multidimensional perfectionism literature; eight statements each for strivings, concerns and socially prescribed perfectionism, scored 8–40 and reported separately, with no composite by design. Items, scoring and the authorship attestation are documented in this tool's provenance record.