Character Strengths: Using the VIA Survey to Do More of What Fits You

Taking the VIA character strengths survey is the easy part. It is a free online questionnaire that ranks 24 traits, such as curiosity, kindness and perseverance, from the ones most like you to the ones least like you.¹ The harder part is what to do with the ranking, and here the research holds a surprise. A 2015 trial in German-speaking countries found that people who used their five lowest-ranked strengths in new ways gained about as much happiness as people who used their top five.²

So the list is a starting point for small experiments, not a verdict on who you are. To get real use from the VIA survey:

1. Take the free survey when you have 15 quiet minutes
2. Read your profile in bands
3. Check your top five against your own life
4. Use one strength in a new way each day for a week
5. Bring a strength to a task you dislike at work
6. Name strengths in the people you live with

Like the other tools for purpose and life design, the survey is worth taking only if the results reach an ordinary Tuesday.

What is the VIA character strengths survey?

The VIA character strengths survey, also called the VIA Inventory of Strengths, is a 96-question online questionnaire that ranks an adult’s 24 character strengths. The VIA Institute on Character says it was developed by psychologist Christopher Peterson, revised by the institute’s senior scientist Robert McGrath, and takes about 10 to 15 minutes.³

The 24 strengths come from a three-year project in which Peterson and Martin Seligman led 55 scientists, with the institute’s support. It produced the 2004 handbook Character Strengths and Virtues and the first adult and youth surveys. The institute, a non-profit based in Cincinnati in the US, now offers the survey free in many languages.⁴

Is the VIA survey free? Yes. After registering with an email address, which lets you pause and resume, you get a free ranked list of all 24 strengths.³ The University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness site, run by Seligman’s Positive Psychology Center, also offers a VIA Survey of Character Strengths to registered users.⁵

What costs money is the explanation. As of October 2026, the VIA Institute sells a Top 5 Report for US$19, an in-depth reading of your top five, and a Total 24 Report for US$49, which adds your middle and lesser strengths and an analysis by virtue.⁶ The institute presents the reports as upgrades of the same results, adding your raw scores and explanation rather than a new measurement, so start with the free list; it is enough for every step in this guide.

What are the 24 character strengths?

The 24 character strengths are traits the VIA Classification treats as morally valued, sorted under six broad virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. The VIA Institute holds that everyone has all 24 in different degrees, so every profile is different.¹

• Wisdom: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, perspective
• Courage: bravery, perseverance, honesty, zest
• Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence
• Justice: teamwork, fairness, leadership
• Temperance: forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation
• Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality

The word “character” matters. These are not job skills or aptitudes; the institute describes them as capacities for thinking, feeling and behaving in ways that benefit you and other people.³ That is why the list includes forgiveness, humility and gratitude, which no aptitude test would measure.

Some strengths are also far more common than others. Peterson, Seligman and colleagues reported in 2005 that across 40 countries, from Azerbaijan to Venezuela, the strengths people most often rated “most like me” included kindness, fairness, gratitude and open-mindedness, while prudence, modesty and self-regulation were consistently among the lesser ones.⁷

In practice, if kindness tops your list and self-regulation sits near the bottom, you look like most people who take the survey, not like someone with a character flaw. What makes a profile yours is the strengths that rank unusually high for you.

Myth

Your bottom five VIA strengths are your weaknesses.

Fact

The VIA Institute calls them lesser strengths: ones you use, value or have developed less than your others, not flaws.

How accurate is the VIA survey?

The VIA survey is reliable enough for self-reflection, but it is a self-portrait. The VIA Institute’s own figures show acceptable internal consistency for most strength scales on the public version, the one you take online.⁸ Three limits matter more for how you read it.

First, every question in the public version is worded positively, a choice VIA made so that reversed items would not confuse test-takers.⁸ So a high score partly reflects how readily you agree that good things describe you.

Second, the six virtues are a tradition-based grouping more than a measured fact. In a 2015 analysis of more than a million cases from four samples, McGrath found the strengths cluster into three broader groups, caring, inquisitiveness and self-control, and noted that earlier studies had mostly found four or five groups.⁹

Third, ranks exaggerate small differences. The institute notes that your fifth, sixth and seventh strengths may be separated by a fraction of a point, that it breaks tied scores with an algorithm, and that the raw scores appear only in the paid reports.³ Strength number 5 and strength number 8 may be almost the same.

How to use the VIA survey results, step by step

Using VIA results well means turning the ranked list into small, specific changes to ordinary days. The steps start with reading the profile, move to the one exercise that has been tested in randomized trials, then to work and home, where the evidence is thinner and comes mostly from surveys.

1. Take the free survey when you have 15 quiet minutes

Answer for how you usually are, not how you want to be. If you are in the middle of a difficult period or a big transition, note that next to your results and consider retaking the survey once things settle.

2. Read your profile in bands

Mark your top five to seven, your bottom five and the middle. Because neighboring strengths can be nearly tied, a strength at number 7 may belong in your top band as much as number 5 does. If your list opens with curiosity, humor, fairness, kindness and love of learning, followed by hope and zest, treat all seven as candidates.

3. Check your top five against your own life

The VIA Institute treats a top strength as a “signature” strength when it feels like the real you, comes easily and energizes rather than drains you; some people have fewer than five, and many have more.³ For each top strength, write down one recent moment you used it. A strength you cannot place in any real moment may describe how you see yourself rather than how you act.

4. Use one strength in a new way each day for a week

This is the exercise tested in the trials described in the next section. Each day, use one strength somewhere you normally would not: curiosity in a dull meeting, by asking one real question; kindness toward a neighbor you only nod to; love of learning through a short read outside your field. Keep it small and new, and if it helps, keep going after the week. If a lesser strength interests you more, practice that one; the 2015 trial suggests it can work too.

5. Bring a strength to a task you dislike at work

At work, the evidence comes mainly from surveys. In a 2017 study in Austria, medical students and resident physicians who said they applied their signature strengths more at work or in their studies also rated their wellbeing and mental health higher, though a one-time survey cannot separate cause from effect.¹⁰ A 2017 review of 18 experimental and quasi-experimental studies linked strengths programs to positive outcomes such as work engagement.¹¹

So pick your most draining recurring task and redesign one part of it around a top strength. Someone high in creativity might turn a monthly report into a one-page visual summary; someone high in social intelligence might pair up for the dullest part of a project. Absorbing work of this kind is close to what the PERMA model calls engagement.

6. Name strengths in the people you live with

At home, the useful move is noticing strengths in others. In a 2018 set of studies of people in romantic relationships, those who appreciated how their partner used their strengths reported more relationship satisfaction and commitment, according to the abstract.¹² These were correlational studies, so start small: once this week, tell a partner, child or housemate which strength you saw them use and what it made possible.

Your first strengths week

• Take the free VIA survey in one quiet sitting
• Mark your top, middle and lower bands
• Write one real moment for each top strength
• Use one strength in a new way every day for seven days
• Redesign part of one draining work task around a top strength
• Tell one person at home which strength you saw them use

Strengths work best when tied to what you care about. If your top strengths and the core values you have named seem to point in different directions, let values decide what matters and strengths suggest how you pursue it.

Does using your strengths make you happier?

Using a strength in a new way each day for a week has given people a modest rise in happiness, lasting months, in online trials that began with Martin Seligman’s in 2005.⁷ Later trials complicate the story: in one, lesser strengths did about as well as top ones,² and in another, so did a placebo exercise.¹³ The deliberate daily attention may matter more than the ranking.

The study

Mixed evidence

Six months after one week of new strength use: Seligman's 2005 online trial

Seligman’s team drew 577 adults from visitors to the website for his book Authentic Happiness and assigned them at random to one of six one-week exercises, one of them a placebo task of writing about early memories; 411 finished every follow-up. The group told to use a top strength in a new way each day reported more happiness and fewer depressive symptoms than at baseline at the one-month check and at every check through six months, while the placebo group’s gain had gone within a week. A lighter version, which only asked people to note their top five and use them more often, helped right after the exercise week and then faded. The average participant started out mildly depressed, and those who kept up the exercise unprompted gained most.⁷

Those volunteers had chosen to visit a happiness website and were mostly well educated, so some may simply have expected to feel better. The follow-up trials are what make the picture useful.

When Mongrain and Anselmo-Matthews at York University in Canada repeated the study in 2012, they used a better control condition and added a positive placeboplacebo: A dummy treatment, such as a sugar pill or a decaffeinated drink, made to look like the real one so that people in a trial cannot tell which they received. Comparing against it separates a treatment's effect from the effect of expecting to be treated.Full entry in the glossary, an exercise meant only to bring positive thoughts about yourself to mind. Their abstract reports lasting gains in happiness from the positive exercises they tested, but also from the positive placebo, and no advantage over the control for depression.¹³

In the 2015 trial, run from Switzerland, people received five strengths without being told whether these were their top or their bottom five. Compared with an early-memories placebo group, both groups showed small gains in happiness, which the authors report lasted up to three months, and both found the exercise equally enjoyable.²

Why would the bottom five work as well as the top five? The trials cannot say for certain, but they suggest the active ingredient may be paying fresh, deliberate attention to something good in yourself each day, more than finding the exact right strength.

Combined results are modest. Schutte and Malouff’s 2019 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary pooled trials of signature-strength exercises and found small effects on happiness and depression and a somewhat larger one on life satisfaction, according to its abstract.¹⁴ A 2019 reanalysis of earlier positive psychology meta-analyses found that once bias from small studies was taken into account, effects on wellbeing were small and effects on depression were not reliable.¹⁵ So if your strengths week feels pleasant but unremarkable, that fits the evidence: expect a gentle lift and keep only the habits you enjoy.

What is the difference between VIA and CliftonStrengths?

VIA and CliftonStrengths both rank your strengths, but they measure different things. VIA ranks 24 morally valued character traits for free, while Gallup’s CliftonStrengths, sold by Gallup and described here from the company’s own pages, ranks 34 talent themes in four domains through a paid assessment.¹⁶

Claims of benefit for both tools come largely from each organization’s own materials, so read them as marketing as well as information.

To understand what you are like at your best across work, family and friendships, VIA fits better and costs nothing. If your employer already uses CliftonStrengths for team planning, its shared vocabulary is a reason to take it. Treat either result as a description to test, never as a limit on the jobs you can do.

The bottom line

Your top band of VIA strengths matters more than any exact rank, and the free list is a reasonably reliable picture of how you see your own character. Trials suggest a week of using strengths in new, deliberate ways gives a small lift, whether or not they are your top five. Pick one strength and use it somewhere new tomorrow.