Conical

Documentation

Glossary & Key Terms

Cognitive Expression Profile (CEP)

A domain-specific measurement of how your personality expresses itself within a specific topic area. It’s derived from either a conversation you have with the AI or from your answers on a personality questionnaire.

What makes a CEP different from a traditional personality test is that it’s domain-specific. Your thinking style when discussing retirement planning may differ from how you approach climate policy. That variation—how your personality shifts across different topics—is the core research question at Conical.

Domain

A topic or area of life—like “401k rebalancing,” “climate policy,” “career change,” or “relationship advice.” When you start a conversation, you describe what’s on your mind, and the system infers the domain.

Domains matter because personality isn’t uniform. You might be highly analytical when discussing investments but more emotionally engaged when discussing family matters. By measuring your CEP separately in each domain, Conical captures how your thinking style varies across different parts of your life.

Conversation Assessment

A CEP inferred by analyzing how you engaged in a conversation with the AI. After you finish a conversation and choose to analyze it, the system reviews how you framed questions, your curiosity and openness to perspectives, how thorough your thinking was, how you responded to suggestions, and your emotional engagement.

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.

Note: Conversation assessments require substantive dialogue (typically 10+ turns) to be reliable.

Self-Attestation Survey

A CEP generated from your direct answers on a 44-question personality questionnaire. The survey is adapted to your chosen domain—so instead of generic statements, questions are phrased within the context of that domain.

For example, in a “climate policy” domain, 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, 5 = Strongly Agree).

Self-attestation surveys give you direct control over your profile. You’re explicitly telling the system how you see yourself, rather than having it inferred from conversation behavior.

Insufficient Data

Shown when you’ve ended a conversation and asked for analysis, but the conversation was too short or lacked enough back-and-forth for a confident CEP inference.

To get a reliable assessment:

  • Have a longer conversation — Aim for 10+ turns with substantive messages on both sides
  • Engage substantively — Share your reasoning, ask follow-up questions, explain your concerns
  • Let the conversation develop — Don’t rush to end it; the most valuable moments happen during deep exploration

Alternatively, skip conversation-based assessment and take a self-attestation survey instead—it always produces a result and gives you direct control.