Take the Personality and Belief in God Survey. I did, and from the questions, I think they’re trying to figure out whether atheists are ordinary people or horrible baby-eating monsters from broken homes or kindly, charitable saints. Give ’em a dose of reality if you’ve got 20 minutes.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
“Do you tend to be more… logical humane”
Wait, those aren’t opposites!
I try to answer it tonight after work.
Yea, I’m getting errors when I try to fill it out at work. I’ll do it at home.
Why are there so many redundant questions?
There are a lot of those questions that don’t really lend themselves to a single answer that they would prefer, as the logical-humane one listed in #1. Like, analytic-sympathetic. I’m not sure how you one is to make that choice. Looking at the world analytically does not preclude sympathy. It seems as though they are trying to create a “Spock” persona for atheists.
Section six was nonsense. It was silly to structure that as a binary instead of a sliding scale like everything else.
Boy am I a textbook atheist with father issues though!
Redundant questions are so that if you’re trying to game the survey, you’ll probably slip up and provide contradictory answers. Then they won’t count them. Plus, it could be an internal test to see if more people answer the same idea worded one way a particular way than another (e.g., “Of course I’m an extrovert! But no, I don’t like being around people.”)
It seems to be designed to see whether atheists are uncaring automatons who use logic to rule and can’t connect with people, and if theists are happy lovey people who care about everyone all the time. Didn’t seem biased towards one point of view, though.
Section 6 is plain stupid. A lot of these choices depend on my mood, the circumstance etc. Sometimes both or neither applies.
And when the results come in…
SURVEY PROVES ATHIESTS ARE HORRIBLE BABY-EATING MONSTERS FROM BROKENHOMES
‘Cos they already had God’s take on the survey, which was amazingly identical to the one they already had (a miracle on par with the translation of the KJB!)
Did the final question about how long you thought it took to complete seem odd to anyone? Why would they want to know this?
Maybe I’m paranoid, but I wonder if the atheist questions were just ‘psychological priming’ for some sort of time perception test.
The question about facts versus theories bothered me… how are these mutually exclusive?
TV200 – I also found that a bit odd. Hopefully they’ll notice that it was posted about here, see that, and take it into account if they ever make another one. Am I analytical or sympathetic? Yes, both!
I took that test but the last bit about the divorce rate annoyed me, because indeed I’m from a “broken” home but both of my parents are ardent believers. Not necessarily in Christ as their personal savior, but they both believe in a Creator of the universe and still do.
I never did, even as a small child I had my misgivings. Luckily for me, my parents accepted my choice always. They were hippies. What are ya gonna do. :)
I wondered if it was just that they wanted to know if people rushed through it or not, but that would be odd since they don’t know how quickly or slowly people read (it took me 10 minutes). That would be cool – I love tests that are secretly tests for something else entirely. (this just in: atheists have better internal clocks than theists! (because we’re ROBOTS))
I was unable to complete the questionnaire as I could not answer section 5, question 3. I don’t classify myself under any of those categories and refused to go any further.
@ Gordon (post #1), re: “Logical OR Humane”… Yeah, that’s a really BS dichotomy there. I’ll finish the survey, but that and a few other questions are really turning me off to it.
@ Brett McCoy (post #11) re: “Facts OR Theories”… indeed. I just assumed that they were using the lay usage of “theory” (as in raw conjecture) rather than the scientific usage.
Alex #16 — Yeah, I wondered if they were using the lay definition of theory, but dumb for the author to assume atheists, who know better, would be using that definition.
That was my thought as well. The question on how long it took just struck me as odd, and far more significant than the muddled questions in the rest of the test.
Last week we find out that some want to create an atheist watch list and this week we are taking a survey to see what level of atheist threat we are.
My choices are ‘truth’ or ‘peace’, I can’t have both. Huh.
You’re not looking at picking between opposites–it’s which one you prefer. I like both facts and theories, but a fact is a fact and a theory is something to gnaw on so I picked theory.
That said, I think I am the opposite of atheist stereotypes–my parents are married, I have a great relationship with them, I went to church but I don’t hate the people there, and I think I am more generally abstract than they are expecting from an atheist. I’ll be interested to see how this one turns out.
I realize now that I seem like a textbook…. people-at-church-were-mean-to-me atheist. But it wasn’t that they were mean people per se, they were just mean to the little girl who asked all the unanswerable questions, like “If AIDS is a punishment from God, did Ryan White go to hell?”. Shit went downhill at church after that.
Got a super secret high-five from Dad for it though, so at least I’m not a daddy-issues atheist.
The binary options were a little odd, but the question did say you might think both applied to you and to choose the one you felt most applied to you.
What I found more strange was the “family only” options regarding who you attended church services with (aged 0-18). You’d think someone interested in religion/belief/atheism and doing a post-doc degree at a major UK university would know that state schools in the UK have a legal obligation to provide a “daily act of worship” for their students. Of course this rule is not all that well-observed, but in my experience most schools do it on at least a weekly basis.
Oh, the benefits of an established church!
TBF, the researcher does explicitly point out at the start of that section that the dichotomies aren’t opposites and that you probably have aspects of both on some and should pick your “favourite”.
On the other hand, although it is indeed fairly standard in these sorts of self-evaluation questionnaires to rephrase the same question a few times to gauge consistency, I thought this one over-egged the pudding on some of them. Specifically, the ones that ask how easily you get angry – I went from my usual state of Zen-like calm to “if you ask me if I’m easily angered one more time I’ll come down to Warwick and beat you to death with the heaviest book about social sciences research design that I can lay my hands on”.
Furthemore, even though it’s a bit longer than the usual targets of pharyngulation, this is still just an online poll with a self-selecting sample, so its results are no more valid than some Fox affiliate asking if God made the world last Thursday.
An awful lot of questions that pose false dichotomies. I had to choose answers based on which fitted the most, not which one I was. That of course will skew the results as that won’t get taken into account properly.
@Megan – I think you may be typical of atheists and their stereotype is wrong.
I took the survey, but I have my concerns about it. As Gordon and others have already pointed out, many of the “either / or” personality questions were set up as obvious dichotomies, but several of them were not at all opposites. I’m not sure if it was the intent of the person collecting the data to present each question as opposite ends of a spectrum, but in several cases this failed… it’s the old “do you walk to school or carry your lunch?” false dichotomy. Not sure how useful data from such a question would be.
Also, many of the questions are quite direct and carry obvious negative connotations (like, “am likely to turn my back on others”) and are not likely to be answered honestly, by people on either end of the “faith” spectrum, because even in anonymity most people think of themselves better than they truly are. Honest introspection is not a common trait amongst most of the humans I’ve come across. Especially the haughty religious. My aunt is one of the most religious people I know. She’s also one of the most bigoted, hate-filled and evil people I know. If you were a minority she wouldn’t piss on you to put you out if you were on fire, but I promise she’d never answer the question about “turning your back on others” honestly, and frankly it wouldn’t even occur to her to think otherwise of herself.
So I guess I’m not sure how much stock I could put into a survey like this. I could easily seeing conclusions being drawn about the religious and their “charity and humanity”, because they truly to think this of themselves… however it rarely is reflected in reality.
Megan –
Megan (#21) — Same here, I was brought up in a happy household by atheist parents who were happily married and stayed that way.
Damn… blockquote fail in 28. Sigh.
Took the test in about 10 minutes. Section 6 does seem like it was set up to be the “gotcha” minefield. It’ll be fun/aggravating to see the results.
You have to wonder, though, if Mr. Baker will pull back the curtain on a data set that screams “LOOK! Atheists are basically misanthropes who eat babies! With anchovies! They said so themselves!!!!”
Happily (mostly – what marriage is perfect) home, with non-religious (not quite atheist) parents who never did anything mean to me. I wasn’t even turned atheist because of mean people at church because we went max once a year (to please my highly conservative grandparents).
So I’m unique too, just like everybody else. :)
Heh, I had the same thought. I’ve read about experiments that made subjects do something completely unrelated to what was actually being measured.
The whole test seemed to be some sort of “Where do Atheists fit on the Autism Spectrum” survey.
Oh look, another survey where I had to lie about my sexual orientation. Apparently “transgendered” (lol) is a gender, too.
You got that vibe, too?
Absolutely did not have the attention span to sit through section 7 after doing section 6, so I closed it. Christ, how many different ways can they ask the same damn question?
Rev. BigDumbChimp @34,
Yes, just what I thought! =^_^=
Anyway, another one who took under 10 minutes here, didn’t like the weird word pairings and started to get irritated by being asked for the umpteenth time how easily I get irritated!
Otherwise, I didn’t get the impression that this was created by a theist going for the ‘gotcha!’ but by someone who did have pre-conceived ideas about when/why/how people come to their faith or atheism, because there was little room for nuance or individuality in the questions.
My (still) happily-married parents got a tick in all the best boxes. My father was always anti-organized religion (described himself as ‘agnostic’) but the best revelation from them was when my previously highly religious mother (a convert from CofE to RC in her teens) recently came out as atheist in her seventies. Of course I’ve had arguments and disagreements with my parents (who hasn’t?) but my father in particular, being Aspie like me, was the person I relied on as an ally. My mother I credit with helping me to learn how to pass as best I was ever going to, although I expect she had times she nearly despaired, poor woman!
I was a keen church-goer as a child and teenager, less so in my twenties (occupied with child-rearing and with no local RC church), increased attendance (but in a CofE church) in my thirties, abandoned the church in my forties and became an atheist in my fifties, largely thanks to Pharyngula.
Clearly, the most salient characteristic of atheists is desire to criticize study design. Anyone who described themselves in the survey as easygoing and never critical is probably…wrong. Or not commenting here.
I ain’t gonna do it! The opening page clearly implies that it’s atheism or only one religion under consideration. Last time I looked, the number of extant religions was several hundred (as Trillian opined, possibly much higher). So, the poll is skewed before it starts.
More interested in facts or theories? What the fuck? Well theories are more interesting, obviously, but is that what they mean? How the hell do I answer that? It’s like asking “Are you more interested in jigsaw puzzle pieces or jigsaw puzzles?”
Scratch that, this whole binary question section is utter shit, not just the facts or theories question. Emotional or unemotional? I’m human. I have human emotions. I am not a robot or Vulcan. But I’m not “emotional” either. Fucking stupid. Survey designers take note: Always use a response scale.
Yeah, this whole binary question is really pissing me off.
Do you prefer the abstract or the concrete? That’s just back to facts or theories again, each has its place.
Do you prefer feeling or thinking?
Seriously? What the fuck does that mean? I like to feel and to think. I don’t pick one over the other, that doesn’t even make sense.
The author of this survey
is an idiotneeds to take a class in surveys and do some prior research to inform their survey design, because their biases are showing or actively trying to manipulate the responses. If this is actually for an academic research paper, his advisers should be embarrassed. I spent half about two weeks of a methodology course on survey design and there were no surveys in my research. Surely if you’re actually doing this you would have some instruction? Maybe it’s just an exercise to be critiqued later in class.OK, that’s three comments in a row, I will refrain from commenting even if the next question really pisses me off.
It’s trying to make it seem like I’m an atheist because I have “daddy issues”, but I’m not! I just have issues with my father and I happen to be an atheist. Stupid thing.
It does seem to be a “How autistic are atheists?” test, but that kind of makes me wonder about the correlation between autism and atheism. Has anyone done any real studies on the issue?
The weird fact/theory, emotion/logic etc questions (I forget the section numbers) are straight out of the Myers-Briggs categories. Looks to me like they’re trying for a quick & dirty MBTI score there. MB questions do tend to be hard to answer without contradiction, but IIRC the test just sums the individual-question scores to produce an overall index.
My main complaint is that the section on under-18yo religious experience does not consider the case of teenage/adult religious conversion, but rather frame the questions as being raised in church. Thus, I truthfully answered that I attended church for three years — ie. from age 15 through 18, but I don’t think that’s what he’s really thinking of. Eg: it wasn’t my agnostic parents’ idea, and I continued into my 40s, but the followup questions are blind to that.
There are three sets of questions, all of which ask the same thing, only stated differently. This is a pretty widely known device for determining how “reliable” your answers are. It was kind of insulting, given how obvious it was.
I also resented the section asking how well I got along with my parents. My parents were assholes. But one was Catholic and the other was an atheist. They agreed to disagree.
What will the pollsters make of that?
I studied polling and public opinion in college, and this thing looked amateurish.
And yes, I agree with the others that it is difficult to answer a black/white question when the reality was gray.
Hah. I couldn’t complete the survey because after seventy-something percent, it went back to the beginning. Bah.
Section 6 seemed designed around the Meyers-Briggs personality types. For what the survey was trying to determine, it kind of makes sense.
I also noticed the “Facts or Theories” question and that set off alarms for me. We rational people know that the word “Theory” is the opposite of a guess. It’s the idea which has the most evidence and has withstood multiple test, has made predictions, and is falsifiable.
Since the phrase “It’s just a theory” is so often used by creationist the misuse of the word was really noticeable.
If this is a legitimate study by somebody studying religion I would be surprised if they weren’t aware of the misuse of that word in the religious community. I well constructed study would have re-worded that question.
Also, I must have missed the baby eating question. I never eat babies. I harvest them for their stem cells.
Did not take test … Might later. Did anybody else notice the earmuffs on the Xtian on the title page? Is it cold or do the. Lock out unwanted sounds/ideas?
I guess I fit in soundly with the daddy- and mommy-issues; I was raised by my maternal grandparents past age 9.
And the false dichotomies of section 6, yeesh, how can I favor one over the other? I enjoy being both punctual and easy-going. It’s all about priorities at the time.
Isn’t this test more likely to trip up the religious who will try to answer as their religion says they should but will get caught on the ‘superfluous questions’.
With all these questions about childhood, I found it suspicious that there was no question about how old I was (mid-40s), how old I was when I became an atheist (in my mid-30s), and whether I had been a churchgoer consistently throughout my life (I attended church until I was in my mid-20s).
The whole survey was weird. I thought it set out to prove that atheists are less charitable, less honest, more angry, less stable, and less sociable than Christians.
Do you prefer to design or to make? Ugh.
I chose “make” because for me that also incorporates “design”.
Fact or Theory also made me roll my eyes. (Chose “theory” on the idea that it is all about how the facts fit together.)
They seem to have a lot of questions related to narcissism and antisocial personalities. Dunno why there would be more of em here than anywhere else?
So which box do people that didn’t get a degree but went to technical school check? There seemed to be HS or University choices only.
You guys know that you didn’t have to take the poll, right? It’s not a test and doesn’t count as part of your “internet grade” or anything. (But I bet Palin wouldn’t finish this poll, either :)…I’m just sayin’).
Personally, I would have created two or three shorter polls and then, after the subject finishes one, offered a link to the next. That way, the choice not to continue could have been an indicator of personality type as well.
As Eamon Knight said, many of the weird questions are straight from Myers-Briggs tests. I was annoyed that it didn’t give me the normal personality type blurb at the end like they normally do. I actually had to spend 3 hours doing tests like this once so that I could get a job. Now that was irritating.
Gus, as mentioned, the feeling/thinking is a standard category breakdown in the Myers-Briggs inventory, which is one of the most popular ones out there. So it is stupid, but it’s not the fault of the people who wrote the survey – they modeled that whole section off of Myers-Briggs (closely enough almost to be plagiarized, but that’s a whole different level of academic inadequacy).
Some of the questions posed were obviously meant to “pigeon hole” the responder, at least that was the feeling I got while taking the survey. All those questions about ones parents and their marriage, but no questions about whether you were involved in a long term relationship or any questions about that aspect of your life….puzzling.
I find these self-evaluation things very difficult. Yes, I’m often irritated and quick to anger (esp. about injustices), but I don’t stay actively angry for very long, so in that sense I’m pretty easy-going. (I felt like they were asking how easily you get mad often enough that they were expecting you to answer more and more aggressively.) I’m not an introvert because I often talk to strangers and am not shy, but at the same time I’m not (at least right now) very socially active. I like parties, but wouldn’t like to be going to them very often.
I took facts to mean details and theories to mean “big-picture” concepts, so I chose theories. But then, I really like facts too.
I didn’t get the question about the time it took.
Oh, and I didn’t get detailed questions about my parents either…maybe because I didn’t answer in the affirmative to the church-going question?
Yeah, that one bothered me, too.
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And I agree with this, too. Definitely some preconceived notions there.
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I’m relieved to see that I’m not the only one!
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I didn’t see a “timed test” question; did they remove it, or did I somehow miss it?
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I suspect that we originate from a wide variety of families. My parents are both devout (Christian Science—fringe!) and remain happily married, and I have no complaints about my upbringing. I left their church when I was 18 but I don’t recall ever believing a word they told me (except in 7th grade, when my Sunday school teacher told us about the wave-particle duality of photons, sparking my obsession with physics).
The survey was pretty annoying though, between the repetitiveness and the “false dichotomy” type questions. Also it reset for me on page six, though the first five pages remained filled out, I just had to go back and redo page six. I also don’t recall being asked about how long it took at the end, as other people have noted.
I rate pretty high on the Autism/Asperger’s spectrum, except for one thing: I don’t get annoyed/frustrated easily, and I tend to like people… a lot. We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of results this guy comes up with.
Those questions about how easily you get angry… yeah. I’m quick to burn up with indignation at something, I’m annoyed as easily as I laugh, I’m a famous snarker… but I easily admit when I’m wrong, I’m utterly non-violent, and I’ve never done anything in anger that I didn’t completely intend to do, or that I regretted later. When things bother me, I’m honest about saying so, that’s all.
It’s sort of stupid to assume that atheists have daddy issues. IIRC, children tend to get their religion from their fathers.
Maybe I needed to answer as if my stepfather were my father?
Oh, and I didn’t get detailed questions about my parents either…maybe because I didn’t answer in the affirmative to the church-going question?
I said no, and got the parent questions.
I didn’t get the time thing.
I think it took me all of three minutes to fill this mindless crap out.
This survey is too dumb to bother taking. And too dumb to blog about.
I think you guys are making too much of the personality inventory questions. They’re not trying to “force” anything. This is basically just an abbreviated version of the MMPI. It will allow the researchers to correlate the results with standard psychometric profiles.
I’m eager to see what they found out — I suspect the results will be inconclusive, though.
I don’t know if you could say I have daddy issues with regard to religion, considering it was because of him I remained a Theist for longer than I probably would have been, but my dad and I were never ‘close’. He was all the positive things, all the things you’re expected to be, but I always felt like it was an act. Not sure if that was me or him.
The thing that annoyed me with the survey was the Logical/Emotional dichotomy. As an artist, I am an emotional, feeling, empathetic person, but I am also a rational person to the degree that my husband tells me I overthink things. Rational!= vulcan thank you very much!
shiit, maybe they are trying to make a guide for how to not have your kids end up as atheists or figure out what went “wrong” with all of us? I do know that years ago the shows aimed at teens said stuff about how if you get to someone when they are young they are a lot more likely to stay religious, they said it up front without any shame or anything.
on an unrelated note
Yeah it smacked of bullshit to me too, I paint and craft in addition to everything I do online. What was worst is that I really get a kick out of philosophy, but also science, so all this shit about if you enjoy theories vs. facts or abstracts vs. concrete matters was really ridiculous. It really depends on what I am trying to accomplish right then, doesn’t it? What is that personality test with four dimensions… myers biggs? That test seems much more well thought out as far as generalizing about personality traits.
I think I have the opposite stereotype: i.e. atheists, more likely to be interested in science, and therefore more likely to be familiar with mathematics and so on, and therefore more likely to be comfortable with abstraction. Probably a completely BS generalization, but nevertheless, to me, being science-minded implies being abstraction-minded.
I’m so average I’ll blow the curve.
Echoing everyone else who says this is just a bastardized version of the MMPI. You’re asked the same question over and over in different ways, because how a question is worded will affect your response to it. What some are perceiving as incorrect opposites, such as “logical” vs. “humane,” are actually word choices designed to flatter the people who choose them. Very few people are going to choose “illogical” or “inhumane.”
I’m not trying to endorse the MMPI, which has its critics. Just pointing out the thought process behind the repetition.
Yeah, Daddy AND Mommy issues here. But it was because I saw through their bullshit at an early age (including the religion) that I had no respect for them. The atheism caused my issues with my parents and not the other way around.
This one bothered me. Observation, investigation, raw facts, whatever you want to call them always trump reason. That’s what science is for, reason gave us all sorts of bizarre untruths.
Just to stir things up a bit. :)
Some more discussion of this survey.
A shorter quiz.
Do you consider yourself stable or easily irritated?
Stable
On a 1-5 scale, are easily annoyed
1
On a 1-5 scale, do other people upset you
2
On a 1-5 scale, do you get irritated often
3
On a 1-5 scale, do you have a short fuse
Would you stop asking the same f@#%^!g question and move on to something else.
What odd questions. “Are you logical or humane?” Can’t I be both?
Uh … what on earth does that mean?!
And the options are:
OK, even “not sure” does not seem appropriate if I don’t even understand the question.
So … Wikipedia is a bust – it suggests connections with Buddhism and Plato, but I didn’t see an explanation anywhere.
So … Google?
The last result on the first side seems to finally offer an explanation:
OK, so this is a somewhat esoteric term for use in the first cause discussion. Fine. But as a question in this survey, this was really badly worded.
Fuck, that annoyed me. “Transgendered” is both incorrect terminology and not a fucking gender. I really get pissed off when people do this. Also, I dislike lying about my orientation. And my parents split and got together again before their final split.
Goddamned poorly-constructed MMPI knockoff.
They wouldn’t see that as any cause for shame; the Wholly Babble says “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”, KJV, Proverbs 22:6.
They just define “the way he should go” as their way.
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You all do understand that the either/or questions (like logical / humane) are not intended to be dicotomous right? They are to see how you prioritize choices based on your values.
If you answered that you “like to think deeply” and then bailed because of one of these questions was too much for you then I think you should examine yourself a little more closely.
logic / humane forms the basis for many moral/ethical dilemma’s. A simplistic example: If cutting off the hands of thieves was PROVEN to reduce crime, would you do it? Pretty inhumane, but possibly a logical win for society. Basically, in a really difficult case, would you apply pure logic no matter the consequences or is being humane a hard stop, even if logic might appear to dictate otherwise.
Crunch crunch…whrrrrrrr…clickety-clack…topocketa-pocketa…buzzz…zzzzing…whistle…ding-dong!
…and out will pop some synthetic mean “atheist” and “theist” which don’t exist, thus encouraging people (especially actuaries and the statistically-inclined ilk) yet again to collapse all of wave-function humanity into neatly organized pigeon-holes which are then considered “typical” and deflecting them from appreciating the actuality of diversity.
And not a single individual theist or atheist will personally identify with those synthetic critter “types”.
Filled it out. I’m basically a gets-along-with-most-people extrovert who’s also a math nerd and engineer. So I already bust some stereotypes.
I too had to stop at section 6, the which category are you most like section. There was not a single selection that I could validly make in that part.
Umm … that depends entirely on your definitions. I’d like to answer “no” here.
Um … both?
And so on and so forth. For most of the questions on this page, I simply don’t know what to answer.
And, of course, this again …
OK, let’s just clicking right and left alternatively. At this stage, the survey has become a joke. 39 of 50 questions get completely arbitrary answers.
OK, and the next page shows that you can ask these kinds of questions without insisting on black-and-white answers.
…while overlooking the fact that Spock isn’t, in fact, an asshole.
…which is still nonsense. Precisely because “analytic” and “sympathetic” aren’t anywhere near opposites, I can’t see how it’s even possible to prefer one over the other.
Day saved. :-D
The author of this survey is an idiot and needs to take a class in surveys and do some prior research to inform their survey design.
Yet another false dichotomy! :-) *duck & cover*
I’m not at all relieved to hear that standard psychometric profiles are crap, you know…
Seconded!!!
I took the theory/fact dichotomies to mean something more like:
“Would you prefer to work out the formulas on a blackboard or
pour stuff into beakers to see if they blow up?”
I know which I would find more fun…
BZZZT! Wrong. Insufficient information.
Is there any other measure that is proven – or reasonably suspected – to reduce crime by a comparable (let alone larger) amount?
And that’s just off the top of my head.
These either/or questions do not involve any choices based upon my values: they are vague pigeonholes or questions of personal preferences which are not rigid.
I think that your choice of “logical/humane” (and the comment “would you apply pure logic no matter the consequences or is being humane a hard stop, even if logic might appear to dictate otherwise.”) clearly demonstrates that you do see that choice as essentially dichotomous.
Th-th-th-th-th-that would depend on how large I’d have to expect the explosions to be. :-S Of course there are fun explosions. But the first thing chemists do when they get together is telling tall tales of spectacular accidents. I once heard a story about an explosion in a chemical institute of the University of Vienna… it was a few decades after WWII, and a professor who happened to be a veteran woke up and immediately thought: “Artillery. It’s war again.”
I repeat: there are fun explosions. :-)
I’m everything.
Does anyone know how to hack it so I can check every circle ever?
And why is 19 the lower limit? Besides having questions about parents which seems silly to extend into later teenage years but then again I’m no psychologist???
Is there any other variant?
Every single version I have seen demanded answers to unanswerable questions, just like section 6 this time.
If your question does not allow for some kind of “I really have no answer for this one”, your test is bullshit, period. And yes, I mean that goes for every question.
Ideally, there should be more than a single option for no-answers, because people can have very different reasons for this[1], but one will do. None,however, is unacceptable – it forces you to lie, and the results are worthless. Worse, you can’t even know when that happened.
[1] For example: Don’t know, don’t understand the question, really have no preference, …
“I am *male / *female / *transgendered”
AAAAAAAAGH. Really, folks? Really?
Nentuaby: I know right? Someone does not know how these concepts work.
Nentuaby – Changed the item to: ‘male, female, neither’ based on a very nice email someone wrote to me explaining the concepts. Do you agree that this is better?
Is this a survey of my beliefs or a test to see just how many times I will tolerate getting jerked around? I finished three screens and it went back to the beginning, I re-did them and finished seven screens and it took me back to the beginning… Not knowing how many more times I will be expected to do this I respectfully decline participation.
Matt at #98, no, that’s actually not better. I’m still lying.
happiestsadist – how about: male, female, it’s complicated? if not, any suggestions? i actually did research this item a bit beforehand and couldn’t find any consensus on the issue… would appreciate any other feedback on this (my email is on the survey site), if not for this survey, for future reference.
I gave up when it asked the question ‘Do you think you’re more capable than most others?’
Capable at what, precisely?
I sent you an email, Matt, hopefully laying out some options. Though I have to say you might have considered a bit more research beforehand, as you were unintentionally really, really offensive. I know it wasn’t your intent, but yeah. And my gender is no more complicated than yours, plus “it’s complicated” is pretty condescending/grating.
“And my gender is no more complicated than yours, plus ‘it’s complicated’ is pretty condescending/grating.”…. Yeah, my instinct said that wouldn’t be the way to go. Sorry for the offence. Thanks for taking the time to write an email.
Oooh! Oooh! I pick ‘splosions!
O’course, I’d want to be doing some of those pourings by proxy, or possibly by telekinesis, and watching from a safe distance (maybe using some type of clairsentience) and position (taking wind direction and proximity to fire-suppression materials/services into account).
–
No problem, life is all about learning. (And pie. The pie is important too.)
I abandoned the survey when it got to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter stuff. May as well have asked me about my sun sign (in fact, you might have done, some time after Q#50, for all I know).
MB at Skeptic’s Dictionary
I prefer it when things are ____
a) salty b) blue
Yeah, yeah. Not opposites, which you prefer, blah, blah, blah. The problem with such things is that, unless there are later questions, which allow for the possibility of, say, asking, “How contradictory *do* you find these terms?”, sometimes having to answer such a question is a either impossible, or a fundamental betrayal of your own principles. It tells you very little about “why” you made a choice, to, for example, ask the question, “Two children are drowning, a boy and a girl, you can only save one. Which one, if either?” It might give some vague indication which is “valued” more by a society, or the individual, but nothing about why. For that matter, it may not even tell you anything about the society. There have been some studies where changing the order of questions actually changes the result, so.. did more people opt to save the boy, than the girl, simply because “boy” was the first option? You just don’t bloody know.
In the case where someone things that its impossible to be human without being logical about it, its pretty damn hard to work out why the hell someone would pick *either*. And, without any followup question, to clarify the details, you are back to, “Why did they answer that way, really? A quirk of the test, the order of the words, or something else?” Data without useful context is meaningless.
Urgh I hate these stupid “or” questions. “Do you prefer air or water?”
since no one thing fits every single situation, and no one person is exactly the same in every single situation, what are these nonsense questions supposed to be gauging?
Not sure what they’re trying to “prove”, but I probably threw a spanner into the works.
Grew up in an intact, loving home with supportive parents. Went to church every Sunday. Became an atheist at age 8.
I see no contradictions there.
#110 – it did seem like they spent a lot of time asking questions looking for mental/emotional problems – are you angry, do you have mood swings, do you care about others, how did your parents treat you, etc etc.
Kinda felt like an attempt at finding out why we “hate” god.
Oh! Question #25 said “remain placid! I was offended there for a second.
The problem with that is I prefer being both logical and humane. I have an equal preference for both.
I tried to complete the survey. Twice the site (surveymonkey) hung after I’d completed all the questions on a page. First time it happened I reloaded the page and the site took me back to the first page of the survey. All the questions on the page were already filled in with the answers I’d already given so all I had to do was press ‘Next’ to go onto the next page, but when I got to the page where it had hung I had to re-answer all the questions.
The second time it hung after a page with dozens and dozens of questions divided into several sections, and currently it’s hanging on me trying to move on from the first page to the second. So, bit of a waste of time at the moment, sadly.
De-lurking to echo the comments above about the strange questions being directly from a Myers-Briggs Test. In an odd coincidence, I took one of these for a work related conference last week – the questions are almost identical.
My guess would be that (in respect of these questions) they are looking for some sort of correlation between atheism and a particular position on the MB personality spectrum. I’m not sure what sort of meaningful contribution that would make though.
Anecdotally, the other members of my work team (most of whom are also atheists) largely tested as I(ntrovert),S(ensing),T(hinking),J(udging). I on the other had tested as the complete opposite – E(xtrovert), (i)N(tuiting), F(eeling),P(erceiving). It would be my assessment, however, that the strong ISTJ results are the result of my profession (I work in a highly specialised technical field), rather than anything to do with the team’s high (compared to society in general) proportion of atheists.
It would be exactly as meaningful as any other correlation to MB “personality types”. Which is to say, not at all.
HERE
Skip down to validity. reliability, utility
Just getting around to finishing this. It seemed to me like they wanted to find out what makes atheists so “angry” (scare quotes intended). I noticed a distinct lack of questions regarding our sense of humor, our love lives, our feelings towards animals, our artistic preferences. It was all about “How often do you get pissed off?” and “Do you like people?” Asinine and frustrating. I doubt any data collected will be worth-while.
Also, I’m glad I didn’t get the time question. I took it while working and forgot about it a few times. It took well over an hour because of that.
Wait, why didn’t it put a citation in the blockquote? I set the cite = “White Rabbit”
Per #115 White Rabitt:
It would be exactly as meaningful as any other correlation to MB “personality types”. Which is to say, not at all.
HERE
Skip down to validity. reliability, utility
It must be MBTI season. I passed an A-frame sign on campus today advertising FREE Myers-Briggs testing as part of a career counseling event.
Like “learning styles”, it is another useless piece of non-information given to students who will use to excuse themselves for not knowing any math. “I am INTJ, so I need you to make allowances for my willful innumeracy and refusal ever to draw a free body diagram…”
@ Uri
Exactly – figuring out a majority of atheists are say ‘INTJ’s would be equally as interesting as saying that a majority of atheists are capricorns.
Even if MBTI were a useful, valid and reliable measure, I still fail to see what meaningful conclusions you could draw from any difference between the personality type spectrum within the atheist group compared to the overall population.
I find it a bit humorous that they are taking a complete personality profile in the questionaire. And it’s the especially long questionaire with redundancy questions to test for lying.
I happen to like the MBTI and find it useful, but I still think it’s weird that they’ve included an entire short-form test in a survey about religious beliefs.
Ugh, fucking Page 6. The ones that weren’t moronic false dichotomies were vague, fuzzy gibberish.
I discovered something about myself by taking this survey. I do get irritated if I get asked too many times if I get irritated.
They kept asking if I was easily angered, which I’m not, but fairly soon I was starting to feel rather angry about how stupid the survey was. Binomial choices that should have been a spectrum, ‘opposites’ that were nothing of the kind, and being forced to choose a race. They asked me what I considered myself to be, and didn’t include ‘human’ as one of the choices. *And wouldn’t let me leave it blank.
Terrible survey – I quit after about 70% What a joke.
I had issues with the sexual orientation question. How hard is it to have an extra ticky-box for ‘other’. I’m not heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, I’m asexual. I always get vaguely peeved off with the default assumption that everyone is interested in sex.
uri, did you deliberately choose the INTJ type (mastermind, recommended to be engineers, computer scientists, etc) to link to innumeracy to show how it isn’t reliable?
Per Samantha Vimes, Chalkboard Monitor
No. I just grabbed some letters out of White Rabbit’s post. I guess I should have chosen something with an F or a P in it?
Notice how the personality type descriptions never read like::
ISFP — Ineffectual and smugly ignorant. Unwarranted sense of entitlement. Thoughtlessly cruel to dumb animals and young children. Prefers “appearance” to “substance”. Well suited to a career as a tax-cheat, shoplifter, or chiropractor. May also find satisfaction as a one-term member of a local school board. Likely hobbies include HAM Radio, painting pictures of sad clowns (by number), and complaining about “those people”
Per DexX
Useful for what, exactly? What kinds of decisions can been made based upon the results of the MBTI?
I wonder what other personality tests people “like”? Who is fond of he MMPI? Who is partial to enneagrams? Who is especially keen on the EQSQ?
Personally, I am such a HUGE fan of the DISC assessment that it isn’t even funny– but then, I pretty much go for anything from David Moulton Marston (lets play Bullets and Bracelets, then take turns tying each other up with the golden lasso).
I too got irritated at how many times I was asked if I got irritated.
When I was in college, I took a similar test, and the one question I recall from it was “Do you prefer to read romance novels or westerns?”, with “neither” not being an option.
*facepalm*
The “cite=” tags don’t actually work here.
*headdesk*
I’ve watched a few westerns, but never read either a western or a romance novel, and I intend to keep it that way.
Where was the baby eating question?
I know what you mean. Many people are non-sexual or otherwise don’t fit within such pigeonholes.
My personal sexual orientation would have to be called ambisexual (since bisexual means divided into two genders, we are therefore all bisexual) or my personal naming preference, Polymorphous Perverse (after Freud). After all, friction is just friction.
But my sexual orientation is quite a small part of what makes up my personal identity. It hardly defines me.
I think some people are confusing the Myers-Briggs and Minnesota Multiphasic personality inventories. The section 6 questions seem to be taken from the MMPI, and not from Myers-Briggs.
The MMPI, like any other psychometric test, is far from perfect, but it’s not a “personality type” test. And, there’s a huge body of raw data associated with the MMPI over the years. You can take that sample of N=ginormous and plot distribution curves across the various traits that the MMPI measures, and that gives you a basis for comparing self-identified groups with the general population.
(For example, the MMPI is often used as an aid to diagnosing mood disorders, since a person with a genuine mood disorder will give answers that are significantly different from the statistical norm.)
What this means is that the researchers can then correlate the results of this survey with a much larger sample of data obtained over many years using a consistent methodology. So, it’s less about “What’s wrong with you people?” and more about, “Do self-identified Atheists/Humanists/etc. differ from the general population in any significant ways?”
I’m no methodologist, but if you’re trying to determine whether atheism correlates with aspects of mood or personality, this seems like as good a way as any.
@HP
Are you certain? The only version of the MMPI I’ve seen (MMPI-2) is a long series of True/False questions.
The perplexing and meaning-free either/or choices in section 6:
7. Are you more… inspirational/practical
13. Do you prefer… feeling/thinking
28. Do you tend to be more… logical/humane
etc.
Look EXACTLY like the gibberish questions in the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
Is there now a version of the MMPI that asks respondents to state a preference for “harmonious relationships” versus “consistency of thought”?