Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Most people open a seven deadly sins quiz expecting a verdict. That's the wrong frame, and it isn't how the list was built. When Pope Gregory I fixed the seven in 590 AD he wasn't drawing up a charge sheet — he was cataloguing appetites, working from the assumption that each one is a perfectly decent instinct that lost its brakes somewhere. Pride is standards with nobody left to answer to. Envy is ambition aimed at the wrong person. Sloth, in the original, isn't laziness at all.

So the useful question isn't whether you're guilty of one. It's which appetite runs your day when you're tired, unobserved and slightly annoyed — because that's the one quietly shaping decisions you never notice making. The quiz above scores all seven and then shows you the two loudest, which is usually the more interesting half of the answer.

And if you arrived here from Nanatsu no Taizai: yes, those are these seven. Meliodas, Ban and the rest are each named after one of the sins below. The originals are older, stranger, and considerably less well-behaved.

Your Worst Sin Is a Virtue With the Brakes Off

Here's the part almost every modern version of this list gets wrong. Medieval theologians called these the capital sins — from the Latin caput, meaning head or source. Not the worst sins. The ones other sins grow out of. That's why murder isn't on the list, and neither is theft. Those are consequences. The seven are engines.

Which means each one is a drive that works beautifully right up until it stops taking instructions. Pride is the refusal to hand in work you're embarrassed by. Envy is an unusually accurate radar for who's genuinely good at what. Wrath is a working intolerance for unfairness. Sloth is immunity to panic. Greed is forward planning. Gluttony is the ability to make a Tuesday feel like an occasion. Lust is noticing people, and making them feel noticed.

That's also why the quiz asks what it asks. Twenty questions about screen time, group chats and blocked driveways rather than twenty moral dilemmas — because dilemma questions have a well-known failure mode: everyone answers them as their best self. A test built on scenarios like our moral alignment quiz is measuring something genuinely useful, but something different. It asks what you would choose. This one asks what you already do at 11:40 on a Tuesday night.

How the List Went From Eight to Seven (and Lost One Entirely)

Around 375 AD, a Greek monk named Evagrius Ponticus was living in the Egyptian desert and writing down the recurring thoughts that ambushed monks during long, empty days. He listed eight of them — logismoi: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride. Note what's missing. Envy wasn't on it. Sadness was.

John Cassian carried the eight to southern Gaul around 420 and put them into Latin for Western monasteries, where they stayed for well over a century. Then Gregory the Great, writing his enormous commentary on the Book of Job around 590, made the edit that stuck. He folded vainglory into pride, merged sadness (tristitia) into acedia, added envy, and set pride apart as the root the rest grew from. Seven survived. Evagrius's original eight became a footnote.

That deletion matters more than it sounds, because acedia absorbed sadness — and that is precisely why "sloth" is such a poor translation. The desert fathers called acedia the noonday demon. Not a nap: a flat, restless indifference that arrives mid-afternoon and makes everything, including things you genuinely care about, feel not quite worth the effort. If you scored sloth above and immediately thought but I work sixty-hour weeks, that's the reason. Acedia has never been about hours.

Dante inherited Gregory's edit wholesale. The seven terraces of Purgatory climb in exactly Gregory's severity order — pride at the bottom, lust at the top, nearest to heaven.

Here's What a Split Result Actually Means

First, how the scoring works, because it changes how you read your numbers. Each of the twenty questions offers four answers, and every answer carries weight toward one or two sins. Raw totals would be unfair: sloth appears on more menus than lust does, simply because there are more plausible ways to opt out of something than to chase it. So each sin is scored as a percentage of its own ceiling — the most it could possibly have earned given the options you were actually shown. A 71 in lust and a 71 in sloth mean the same thing.

Three worked examples, all of them score shapes the quiz can actually produce:

Pride 70 · Wrath 52 · Envy 32, nothing else above 20.An 18-point lead is wide. This is a clean result — one appetite is unambiguously in charge, and the wrath sitting underneath it is pride's enforcement arm rather than a separate problem. In practice this is the profile of somebody who wins arguments they were never invited into.

Envy 57 · Pride 54 · Greed 38.Three points apart is a tie, not a photo finish, and it's the most common tie in the set for a structural reason: pride and envy measure the same comparison from opposite ends. Pride asks whether you're above them. Envy asks whether they're above you. A three-point gap means you flip depending on which room you walk into.

Sloth 73 · Gluttony 71 · nothing else above 21.The number worth reading here isn't which of the two won — it's the fifty-point cliff down to third. That's not a conflicted person, that's a consistent one. Both are comfort behaviours, and they tend to rise and fall together across the same rough month.

The rule of thumb: a gap of fifteen points or more is a real lead. Under eight, read both descriptions and take the pairing seriously. In between, your top sin leads but can be displaced by a bad week.

Has Anyone Actually Measured These Things?

Rather more recently than you'd guess. In 2014 a team at the University of Western Ontario — Veselka, Giammarco and Vernon — published a paper in Personality and Individual Differences scoring participants on all seven sins and cross-referencing them against the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Every one of the seven lined up with at least one Dark Triad trait, and psychopathy had the broadest reach across the set. A fourth-century monastic checklist turned out to be measuring something a modern personality inventory can find.

Six of the seven now have a validated instrument with a name attached:

Look at row four. Sloth is the only one of the seven without its own instrument. The oldest, least translatable entry on the list — the one that swallowed sadness in 590 and never gave it back — is also the one we're still worst at measuring. Researchers reach it sideways, through motivation and anhedonia, which is a bit like measuring a colour by describing everything it isn't.

There's also a stranger piece of evidence. In 2009 a geography team at Kansas State mapped statistical proxies for all seven across US counties — fast-food density for gluttony, violent crime for wrath, theft for envy — and produced a "geography of sin" map that made the rounds. Methodologically it's a party trick. But it made a real point: every one of the seven leaves a footprint you can count.

Gregory Put Lust Last. The Data Says He Had a Point

Gregory's order, gravest first: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust. Modern instinct puts lust somewhere near the top and pride nowhere at all. Both can't be right, and the older one is holding up better.

His logic was structural rather than moral. He ranked the seven by how far each one turns you away from other people. Pride is entirely inward. Envy needs another person only as a mirror. Lust, whatever else it is, is oriented toward someone — which made it, in Gregory's reckoning, the least dangerous of the seven. Britannica's summary of the tradition keeps that ordering intact.

The two sins that predict the worst outcomes in the research aren't the loud ones. Dispositional envy tracks with lower life satisfaction across repeated studies, and it has a property none of the other six share: it delivers no pleasure at any stage. Greed at least enjoys the money. Gluttony enjoys the meal. Envy just aches. Acedia, meanwhile, maps onto exactly the motivational deficits that keep people stuck for years at a time. So if you scored sloth or envy and felt relieved it wasn't wrath, reconsider that. Wrath is loud, which makes it correctable. The quiet two aren't.

If you want the same territory sorted by a different variable, the enneagram quiz runs at it from underneath — nine types organised by core fear rather than core appetite. A pride result here very often turns up as a Three or an Eight over there, which is a useful cross-check on whether the quiz caught you or flattered you.

The Seven Virtues Nobody Bothers to Name

Around 410 AD the poet Prudentius wrote Psychomachia— "battle of the soul" — which staged each vice against one specific opposing virtue in single combat. Those pairings became standard, and they're considerably more useful than the sins on their own, because each one names an antidote instead of handing down a verdict.

The pairing structure is the part worth stealing, whatever you think of the theology. Guilt moves none of these — but the virtue opposite yours is a behaviour, and behaviours are trainable. Aquinas added the corollary that quiz pages always skip: a contrary virtue taken far enough becomes its own vice. Humility pushed hard enough is just pride in a different coat, loudly announcing how little it thinks of itself.

All Seven Deadly Sins, Result by Result

👑 Pride (Superbia)— the one who can't be small. Pride wants to be right more than it wants to be liked, and it wants witnesses. It runs on genuine standards, which is why proud people so often deliver. The cost shows up in apologies that always carry a clause, and in a private conviction that most rooms would function better if somebody sensible were in charge.

🐍 Envy (Invidia)— the one who keeps score. Envy isn't about wanting more; it's about wanting theirs. It comes with an unusually good eye for who is actually competent, because you've been paying close attention. The cost is that your life gets measured in someone else's units, and those units keep changing without notice.

🔥 Wrath (Ira)— the one who remembers. This anger is rarely loud; it's archival. It runs on a real intolerance for unfairness and you'll defend people who can't defend themselves. The cost is the three-day replay, where you keep winning a conversation that ended on Tuesday and nobody else remembers having.

🌫️ Sloth (Acedia)— the one who defers. Not laziness: a flat, unbothered quality that can run underneath a very busy life. The upside is that you don't panic and can't be stampeded, which is worth a great deal in a crisis. The cost is a list of things you'd start immediately if starting weren't the hard part.

🪙 Greed (Avaritia)— the one who counts. Greed converts things into things you can keep: savings, contacts, credit, options. It makes you a planner who isn't caught out, and that's rarer than it sounds. The cost is that "enough" is a number, and you keep quietly moving it further away.

🍷 Gluttony (Gula)— the one who doesn't stop at enough. Aquinas counted five ways to commit it and only one involved quantity. It makes you the person who turns an ordinary evening into an occasion, and people angle for your invitations. The cost is comfort that arrives faster than the feeling it was sent to cover.

🌹 Lust (Luxuria)— the one who wants to be wanted. Ranked least grave of the seven because it's the only one that still requires another person. It makes you genuinely good at noticing people and making them feel noticed. The cost is attention doing structural work it was never rated to carry.

The One Question That Decides More Than the Other Nineteen

The final question asks what you do with wanting, and it carries more weight than any of the others — not because of the arithmetic, but because the previous nineteen are all variations on it. Chase, resent, hold, or let it sit. Four answers, and most people know which one is theirs before they finish reading.

Augustine got there two centuries before Gregory. Writing in the late fourth century, he argued that sin wasn't appetite at all — it was ordo amoris, love in the wrong order. Wanting good things in the wrong proportion, or in the wrong sequence. That reframing is why none of the seven can be fixed by wanting less. You're not being scored on whether you want. You're being scored on what happens next.

Which makes the genuinely useful move with your result something smaller than repentance: learn your tell. Pride's tell is the sentence you keep rehearsing. Envy's is the tab you keep open. Wrath's is the three-day replay. Sloth's is the flat afternoon. Greed's is the balance you refresh for no reason. Gluttony's is the reach that happens slightly before the hunger. Lust's is the check for a reply.

Catch yours twice this week — just catch it, don't fight it — and you'll have got more out of a quiz score than a quiz score has any right to give you. And if you'd like the same map drawn from the opposite direction, the boggart quiz sorts people by what they're afraid of rather than what they want. The two results are related far more often than coincidence would allow.