Signature Strengths: More Frequency Data

(April 6, 2009)

By Neal H. Mayerson, Ph.D
Chairman, VIA Institute on Character

Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman define signature strengths as “strengths of character that a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises.”  They recommend taking a look at the top 2 - 5 ranked VIA character strengths as a point of departure in the process of identifying signature strengths.  In August of last year, we reported the results of a random sampling of VIA survey results in which we looked at the frequency with which various strengths appear in people’s “top 5” rankings of their character strengths.  We recently revisited this question by looking at the most recent 655,000 survey results.

In addition to finding similar results (see below) in terms of the rank ordering of most-common and least-common “signature strengths,” other interesting results were found.  These results may be useful to practitioners who are consulting with groups, working with clients, and those who are giving workshops, since they provide a guideline for guessing what signature strengths might be represented most commonly and least commonly in an audience.  

We found that in this large sample:
•    93% of respondents have either fairness, curiosity, love,  judgment & open-mindedness, or kindness among their top-5 ranked character strengths.
•    87% of respondents have either fairness, curiosity, love, or judgment & open-mindedness as one of their top 5 strengths.
•    77% of respondents have either fairness, curiosity or love as one of their top 5 strengths.
•    61% of respondents have either fairness or curiosity as one of their top 5 strengths.

So, as one prepares a presentation he or she can guess that nearly everyone in the audience will have fairness, curiosity, love, judgment & open-mindedness, and/or kindness among their top 5 VIA character strengths, and by simply focusing on these strengths as examples the speaker will be personally connecting with 93% of the audience. Likewise, a clinician or coach who does not have immediate access to the VIA-IS can ask one simple question to potentially have an immediate impact (e.g., “Do you most identify yourself as a fair, curious, loving, open-minded, or kind person?”); it is highly likely that the client would self-identify with one of these five.

For the clinician or coach, simply having these five strengths in the back of the mind can be useful in creating client-based interventions or strategies in the moment.

Frequencies with which each character strength appears as a top 5 strength in a sample of 655,000 VIA-IS respondents:
1.    Fairness -  36%
2.    Curiosity – 34%
3.    Love – 34%
4.    Judgment & Open-Mindedness – 33%
5.    Kindness – 32%
6.    Honesty – 31%
7.    Gratitude – 29%
8.    Humor – 27%
9.    Love of learning – 27%
10.   Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence – 26%
11.   Creativity – 25%
12.   Religiousness – 18%
13.   Forgiveness – 17%
14.   Perseverance – 17%
15.   Teamwork – 16%
16.   Bravery – 15%
17.   Social Intelligence – 14%
18.   Hope – 14%
19.   Leadership – 13%
20.   Perspective – 12%
21.   Prudence – 9%
22.   Modesty – 9%
23.   Zest – 8%
24.   Self-Regulation – 4%

Frequencies with which each of the Virtue categories appears in respondents’ top 5 strengths:

1. Wisdom - 73%
2. Courage - 54%
3. Humanity - 60%
4. Justice - 49%
5. Temperance - 33%
6. Transcendence - 73%

This shows that 73% of people have at least one of the strengths of Wisdom (creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, or persepctive) among their top 5 strengths.  And, 73% of people have at least one of the strengths of Transcendence in their top 5, 60% have strengths of Humanity in their top 5, and so on. Consistent with what has been reflected in studies to date on character strengths, the strengths within the Temperance virtue (character strengths of forgiveness, modesty & humility, prudence, and self-regulation) are the least-represented  in an individual’s top 5 character strengths.