The science behind Cèrcol
Open instruments
No proprietary tests.
Every question in Cèrcol comes from a public-domain collection of personality items used in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. No licensing restrictions, no black boxes. Anyone can read the items, run the scoring, and verify the results.
The five-factor model
The most replicated finding in personality psychology.
Across cultures, languages, and methods, research consistently recovers the same five broad dimensions of personality. Cèrcol uses these under different names — Presence, Bond, Discipline, Depth, Vision — to make the language warmer without changing what's being measured.
Replicated in more than 50 countries. The strongest consensus result in differential psychology.
Five dimensions
What Cèrcol actually measures.
Five broad dimensions of personality — each covering a different axis of human variation. The dimensions are the same across all three instruments. Only the resolution changes.
How much energy you bring into a room — and how much you draw from being around others. High Presence means initiative, expressiveness, and comfort in the spotlight. Low Presence means depth in focused work, and a listening quality most groups undervalue. Teams need both.
Bell, 2007
How you navigate the tension between harmony and honesty. High Bond means warmth, trust, and genuine care for the people around you. Low Bond means you hold your ground, challenge assumptions, and keep the group from fooling itself. Both ends are functional. Most teams need both.
Bell, 2007
How drawn you are to ideas, novelty, and complexity. High Vision drives curiosity, imagination, and comfort with the unknown. Low Vision grounds a team in what is real, tested, and actionable. No healthy team is homogeneous on this dimension.
Bell, 2007
How reliably you follow through. High Discipline means planning, structure, and doing what you said you would do. It is the most replicated predictor of job performance in the research literature — not because rigid people do better, but because consistent people do.
Barrick & Mount, 1991
How readily you experience negative emotion — worry, frustration, sensitivity. High Depth often comes with heightened vigilance and strong empathy. Low Depth means steadiness under pressure. Neither extreme is a flaw; both reflect different ways of reading the world.
Bell, 2007
Role taxonomy
Twelve roles. Derived from the research, not invented.
The role taxonomy is grounded in the AB5C circumplex (Hofstee, De Raad & Goldberg, 1992) and the team composition literature (Bell, 2007). Three OCEAN dimensions — Presence, Bond, and Vision — require balance in teams. The twelve roles cover the six intersections of these three dimensions at both poles. Discipline and Depth modulate how each role is expressed.
Current role assignments use theoretical centroids derived from published research. As real data accumulates — target: 300 Full Moon completions — centroids will be replaced with empirical values from actual profiles.
Role scoring is labelled beta in the interface. It is illustrative, not diagnostic.
Full Moon Cèrcol
Two lenses on the same person.
Self-report
120 items across 5 domains and 30 facets — twice the resolution of First Quarter. Forms the primary role result.
Witness Cèrcol
A forced-choice task given to someone who knows you well. Each round, the Witness sees five words and picks the best fit and worst fit for you — one adjective per dimension. Forced choice eliminates the social desirability bias that distorts self-report.
The Witness result is compared to the self-report. Where they diverge significantly, a blind spot is flagged — a dimension you see differently than the people around you do.
Ideal Witness
An ideal Witness has worked with you, lived with you, or spent real time around you. Not your closest ally, not your harshest critic — someone who sees you as you actually are.
Validation plan
A working hypothesis, not a finished product.
Cèrcol's role system uses theoretical centroids derived from published AB5C research. Role assignments are illustrative — they have not yet been empirically validated against real team outcomes. Validation is planned in three stages.
N ≥ 300
Confirm internal consistency of role assignments and compare self vs. Witness convergence.
N ≥ 1 000
Test whether role diversity predicts team performance across domains.
Preprint
Publish findings on PsyArXiv for open peer review before any journal submission.
Until validation data exist, treat role results as a starting point for reflection, not a diagnostic tool. The scoring algorithm and all assumptions are fully documented in the open-source repository.
References
The code is open.
Cèrcol is open source. The scoring logic, item corpus, and role algorithm are all readable.
View on GitHub