Our Attachment Style Test vs. The Attachment Project and the "Attached" Quiz
If you've searched for an attachment style quiz, you've probably run into two names besides ours: The Attachment Project, a site that publishes its own quiz, and "Attached," the popular 2010 book by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller that many people take a related quiz after reading. All three point at the same underlying idea. The questionnaires behind them aren't the same thing.
Same Framework, Different Instrument
Every attachment style quiz worth taking is built on the same general academic model: Bowlby and Ainsworth's original attachment theory, extended to adult relationships by Bartholomew and Horowitz's 1991 four-category framework, secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. That framework itself is public, academic research, not owned by any single site or book.
The Attachment Project is a separate, independently run company with its own quiz and its own commercial coaching programs built around it. The "Attached" quiz that circulates online is associated with Levine and Heller's book, not something we have any relationship to. Our attachment style test is a different, original 24-item questionnaire we wrote ourselves, informed by the same public framework, not a copy of either one.
Why the Same Person Can Get Different Results
Attachment style isn't a hard boundary, it's closer to a spectrum in two dimensions: how positively you view yourself, and how positively you view others in close relationships. Most people lean toward one style but aren't purely one thing.
That means a slightly different set of items, or a slightly different scoring cutoff, can push someone who's genuinely close to two styles toward a different top result on two separate quizzes. It's not that one quiz is right and the other is wrong, it's what happens whenever two independent questionnaires measure the same fuzzy construct with different wording.
What We Do Differently
We wrote every item in our test from scratch, informed only by the general academic description of each style, never by paraphrasing a specific published questionnaire's wording. That distinction matters more here than it might seem: some of the most-cited academic attachment measures, like the ECR and ECR-R, require the original researchers' permission for commercial use, permission we don't have and haven't claimed to have. We built our own instrument instead of working around that.
Our full methodology page names the academic sources behind the 4-category model directly, Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Bartholomew & Horowitz, so you can see exactly what theoretical foundation the test rests on. Every question, your full results, and each style's in-depth profile are free, with no email, account, or paid coaching upsell attached to the result.
Which One Should You Take?
If you've already taken a quiz from The Attachment Project or after reading "Attached" and want an independent second read, our free attachment style test takes about 8 minutes and shows your full score breakdown across all 4 styles, not just your top result. Treat any difference between quizzes as a sign you're closer to the boundary between two styles, not as one test being wrong and the other right.
FAQ
Is your attachment style test a copy of The Attachment Project's quiz?
No. It's our own original 24-item questionnaire, informed by the general public four-category adult attachment model, not a copy of The Attachment Project's quiz or the "Attached" book's quiz.
Why did I get a different attachment style on each quiz?
Different questionnaires word their items differently and weigh them differently, so it's common to land near the boundary between two styles and get pushed toward a different one on a separate test.
Is one of these quizzes more official than the others?
No. None of them are licensed against each other or against a single clinical standard. They're independent instruments built around the same general academic framework.