Personal 09 Mar 2007 08:25 am
The BBC's personality test
The problem with personality tests, you see, is that they don't account for complexity. I know how they'll make me out to be, and this just isn't the case. Even though the instructions say "Choose the answer that most closely matches" — and I do — it's not enough. Because usually I'm 60% one way and 40% the other.
I suppose this works for some people, but it doesn't for me. The results are much more polar than they might be.
Mutual exclusivity
The trouble with personality tests is that they use OR instead of AND. AND describes me, because many of these personality traits that they are supposedly measuring can and do coexist with one another. OR implies mutual exclusivity: one but not the other.
If you could ascribe percentages to the quiz options rather than being able to choose only one, they might be more useful. The world isn't binary, for goodness sake. But that would involve more complex backend math, and we can't have that, now can we?
It's important to remember that no survey can predict personality type with 100 percent accuracy. Experts say that we should use personality type to better understand ourselves and others, but shouldn't feel restricted by our results.
on 09 Mar 2007 at 9:01 am 1.Cailin Coilleach said …
You make good point, but of course the Beeb's test is rather "light weight", shall we say?
Aren't there any personality tests out there that -do- include AND options? Or tests that build some kind of AND in the background by asking you multiple questions that are actually linked together?
on 10 Mar 2007 at 8:17 am 2.Rian said …
Not that I've seen, no. The only way to get a better picture of someone using the multiple choice format is to ask a sufficiently large variety of questions that test more than superficial characteristics, e.g. "What response best describes how you would respond if XYZ?"
This is a bandaid for the mutual exclusivity problem most of the time, but still doesn't result in an accurate test for an emotionally complex individual. ("Ogres… are like onions!")
The best personality test I've ever seen was actually eHarmony — it was like this test, but much more fine-grained and it was long. Took me an hour to do, if I recall, and many of the questions stopped and made you really think.
The results generated from that were pretty much in line with who I was as a person, but still had a few nuances I completely disagreed with. (Though I could see how they could arrive at their conclusions.) They were largely minor, however.