Documentation
CEP Assessment
A Cognitive Expression Profile (CEP) is a measurement of how your personality expresses itself within a specific topic area. It’s the core measurement in Conical, and it’s fundamentally different from a traditional personality test.
What Makes a CEP Different
Traditional personality tests measure you once, generically: “How do you behave in general?” A CEP asks: “How do you behave when thinking about this specific topic?”
Your openness when discussing climate policy might be high (you seek out multiple perspectives, question assumptions), while your openness in financial decisions might be moderate (you prefer established strategies). A CEP captures that variation.
Multiple Cognitive Dimensions
A CEP measures how you engage across multiple cognitive dimensions—how curious you are, how systematic your thinking is, how you handle disagreement, and more. These dimensions are observable in how you actually engage, not how you’d describe yourself.
These dimensions are grounded in decades of validated personality research, but we apply them in a novel way: measured domain by domain, showing how your thinking style shifts across different parts of your life.
Two Ways to Get Assessed
1. Conversation Assessment
After completing a conversation, you can choose to analyze it for personality signals. The system reviews:
- How you framed questions and concerns
- Your curiosity and openness to different perspectives
- How thorough and systematic your thinking was
- How you responded to suggestions and counterarguments
- Your emotional engagement with the topic
From these signals, the AI builds your CEP without you having to answer explicit questions. This is post-hoc analysis—you don’t need to think about your personality, just have a genuine conversation.
Requirements: Conversations need enough dialogue to be reliable. Aim for 10+ turns with substantive engagement. If your conversation is too short, the system may show “Insufficient Data.”
2. Self-Attestation Survey
A self-attestation is a CEP generated from your direct answers on a 44-question personality questionnaire. The survey is adapted to your chosen domain, so questions are phrased in the context of that specific topic.
For example, in a “climate policy” domain, instead of a generic question like “I am creative,” you might see: “I actively seek out perspectives on climate change that differ from my current thinking.”
You rate each statement on a 5-point scale:
- 1 = Strongly Disagree
- 2 = Disagree
- 3 = Neutral
- 4 = Agree
- 5 = Strongly Agree
Your responses generate your CEP.
Why choose self-attestation? It gives you direct control over your profile. You’re explicitly telling the system how you see yourself, rather than having it inferred from conversation behavior. Some people prefer this directness; others prefer the implicit nature of conversation assessment.
What Your CEP Tells You
Your CEP isn’t a score to optimize. It’s a picture of how you think in that specific domain. The goal is understanding your thinking style within the context that matters to you, and seeing how that style might shift across different domains.