Character strengths ranked: all 24 VIA strengths among Korean and US respondents

Character strengths are the 24 positive traits that the positive psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman classified (Peterson and Seligman, 2004). Strengths such as honesty, love and fairness sit under six virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

One of the largest published sources on which strengths people rate highest is a study of 1,063,921 adults in 75 nations who took the VIA strengths survey (McGrath, 2015). In short, Korean respondents rated honesty, love and fairness highest, and humility and bravery lowest.

This guide sets out the 24 strengths as Korean and US respondents ranked them in that study, what the two countries and the 75 nations have in common, what to keep in mind when reading the numbers, and how they differ from a result on the mind.io VIA strengths test.

The study took the answers of adults who finished the 240-item VIA Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) on the Authentic Happiness or VIA Institute website between 2002 and 2012, split them by country and ranked the strengths for each of the 75 nations with at least 150 respondents. Each item is answered on a five-point scale from “very much like me” to “very much unlike me”, so a country’s ranking orders the strengths by its respondents’ mean scores. There were 9,183 Korean respondents.

Korean respondents’ highest mean was for honesty (3.83), followed by love (3.80), fairness (3.77), judgment (3.71) and perspective (3.70). At the bottom were humility (3.31), bravery (3.37), self-regulation (3.45), forgiveness (3.46) and spirituality (3.47). The table below shows all 24 strengths with their Korean and US ranks.

The 634,933 US respondents put honesty, fairness, kindness, judgment and curiosity in the top five. Both countries have honesty first and fairness and judgment near the top, but there are differences. In Korea, love (2nd in Korea, 7th in the US), perspective (5th, 9th), appreciation of beauty (6th, 15th), hope (8th, 16th) and prudence (15th, 22nd) ranked higher than in the US. Kindness (11th, 3rd), humor (18th, 8th) and bravery (23rd, 18th) ranked lower.

The means themselves were lower in Korea than in the US for 22 of the 24 strengths; only prudence and self-regulation were slightly higher. That does not mean Koreans are less honest or less kind. The author notes that it is unclear whether such differences between countries are real or come from how the items are interpreted or from sampling. So rather than compare scores across countries, it is safer to look at which strengths come out relatively high within one country.

The order varied a little from country to country, but the broad pattern held. Countries’ rankings correlated with the US ranking at 0.85 on average (0.49 to 0.99 depending on the country), and Korea’s at 0.80. Fairness made the top five in all 75 nations, and humility and self-regulation were near the bottom everywhere. Averaging the rankings of the 74 nations other than the US put fairness, judgment, honesty, curiosity and kindness in the top five.

By region, the rankings of 12 East Asian nations were less similar to the US ranking than those of 30 European nations (mean correlations of 0.78 and 0.87). An earlier study of 54 nations (Park, Peterson and Seligman, 2006) also reported this similarity across countries, except that its top five included gratitude rather than curiosity.

The participants were people who chose to finish a long survey online. Of them, 87.39% had attended college and 66.18% were women, and although the language of completion was not available, the author thought most answered in English. The author also wrote that the samples were probably biased for many countries and that the results generalize only to relatively well-educated people interested in character strengths.

The rankings are averages of self-ratings, not observations of behavior. A country’s ranking shows which strengths its respondents described as more like them than their other strengths; it does not define the character of the people of that country. It is not unusual for your own top strength to sit low in these rankings.

The mind.io VIA strengths test is a short test of its own that asks two questions for each of the 24 strengths, 48 in all, and lists your strengths from the highest score down. Its questions differ from the 240-item VIA-IS used in the study, so the order of your result cannot be compared directly with the table above.

The VIA top strength ranking anonymously counts only the strength that came first in the results of people who tap the join button on their own result page. All that is sent is the test, the result and the page language; no answers or scores. The numbers count entries, not people, and with 24 strengths the ranking stays hidden until 120 entries are in.

In short, the study’s ranking orders the strengths by the mean of a country’s respondents, while the mind.io ranking counts how often each strength comes out first for one person. Both are called rankings, but they answer different questions.

Q. Which character strengths did Korean respondents rate highest? A. In the 75-nation study, the 9,183 Korean respondents rated honesty (3.83), love (3.80), fairness (3.77), judgment (3.71) and perspective (3.70) highest (McGrath, 2015). They took the survey online by choice, so this is hard to read as a ranking for all Koreans.

Q. Which strengths come out lowest? A. Korean respondents rated humility (3.31) and bravery (3.37) lowest. Across the 75 nations, humility and self-regulation were near the bottom everywhere. A low rank does not mean a lack: it means respondents described that strength as less like them than their other strengths.

Q. Does this mean Koreans are less honest than Americans? A. No. The means were lower in Korea for 22 of the 24 strengths, but the author notes it is unclear whether such differences are real or come from how the items are interpreted or from sampling. Read the rankings as a comparison of strengths within one country.

Q. Why does the mind.io ranking differ from this study? A. The number of questions (48 versus 240) and the way of counting differ. The study orders strengths by mean score; the mind.io ranking counts the top strengths of people who chose to join.

References: Peterson & Seligman (2004), Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, American Psychological Association; Park, Peterson & Seligman (2006), The Journal of Positive Psychology 1, 118-129, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760600619567; McGrath (2015), The Journal of Positive Psychology 10(1), 41-52, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.888580.