# What is the purpose of the neutral option? The neutral category provides an option for the respondent who truly does not have an opinion on a question so that they are not forced to respondent positively or negatively. If you do not include a neutral option, you are forcing employees to make a choice, when in reality there are times when people have no opinion. Without a neutral rating, the tendency is for people to choose the more positive rating, and accordingly, it will falsely skew results towards favourable. Research confirms that you should not use an even-numbered rating scale (e.g. 4-point or 6-point). TalentMap utilizes the five-point Likert scale, the most common scale in attitudinal research because a five-point scale is widely considered to represent the “natural” number of opinion plateaus or levels. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.talentmap.com/site-faq/faq/survey-design/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-neutral-option.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.