After finishing I couldn’t believe it. I thought maybe it was part of a larger experiment telling you what you want to hear. So I took the test again answering randomly and got a horrible score and 20th percentile. (ie it’s a real score)
So much of this seems so incredibly obvious to me! I mean I guess it make sense when you think about it. If it was obvious to most people, then most people would make better (less selfish, less bias) decisions which we see they don’t do.
Some that particularly struck me were the ones about group think. Like passing someone in the gutter, in-group validation, group enhancement of extremism etc. I always have an almost knee jerk reaction to go against the group in lots of situations (if there’s a large group of people walking in a certain direction; I’ll assume they’re all lost and make my own way for instance)
Explains a lot! Thanks for the link.
And here’s a fun experiment. If I call out how much of downvoting and upvoting on sites like here on HN are about group think, other biases, rather than based on the individual comment, I bet it’ll get downvoted (because of those same reasons)!
By my count, of the commenters who posted a score so far, 5/13 (~40%) scored better than 99.5% of people and all of them scored better than 80% of people.
HN readers is obviously not an unbiased sample, nor is the subset that choose to reveal their scores. Still, I wouldn't put too much stock in this internet survey. They can be notoriously unreliable.
(As an aside, a number of questions are obvious because they're phrased as "True or false: X can never happen" (answer is false). The true ones don't use an absolute qualifier like "never". The use qualifiers like "usually" or "mostly".)
Most of these sundry facts I suspect I learned by osmosis after spending too much time on the internet — but I would never have called myself a natural psychologist, so I don't know how much predictive power this study really has =)
32/40.
I'm not sure what this says about me or the survey.
Of course I understand their point that social psychology is cynical, but I hope it isn't all cynical. I think there might be a publication bias here--studies which find that people act predictably and rationally don't become famous. No one would have heard of the Milgram experiment if everyone refused to shock the man.
Many of the questions are directly out of famous experiments where if you have read/heard about it, you know the correct answer. I do question if perhaps bored introverts just spend a lot of time reading books and articles instead of possessing some sort of innate insight into humanity.
Most research has large gaping holes and make big assumptions in the interpretation of the gathered data. This hole is then “resolved” in the discussion part of the paper by acknowledging that the experiment could have been done in a better way.
I'm also sad and lonely, I wonder why... :-D
Before reading the article, I'll speculate that the reason people are sad and lonely is because they understand how terrible humans generally are, but haven't found any way to benefit from this knowledge.
> Bob experiences numerous positive things when surrounded by a grapefruit. He wins a little money at the lottery, listens to his favorite music, and eats his favorite meal. Is it possible that Bob infers that he likes this particular grapefruit more than other grapefruits, because he has experienced all these positive feelings around this grapefruit?
I can kind of understand what it's asking, but this is worse on my brain than "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". It feels like I've stepped into a surrealist novella.
I took that question to be asking about tbe effects of positive mood and positive luck on the enjoyment of the grapefruit. If he had instead had bad luck, had a flat tire, and got an annoying ad jingle stuck in his head, would he feel he disliked that particular grapefruit more than other grapefruit? I personally said yes.
I agree though, some questions were very awkward in wording and I wonder what the optional questions about the symmetric vs asymmetric shape groupings was about.
I feel like I spent an entire decade mostly in contemplative reflection and observation as I searched for intrinsic meaning and purpose.
I imagine many others who score well have some similar period they've been through where it almost feels like they spent more time observing themselves and others living than actually living.
> If you wanted to create a company that is fair in terms of hiring practices, what percent of each of the following groups of people would you hire? [...] Please make sure the amounts you enter add about to approximately 100%. (The groups are Hispanic, White, Asian, and Black.)
What are they trying to learn from this, and how are you supposed to answer it?
1. You can't intentionally hire percentages of employees by race because that's illegal.
2. How do I make the amounts add up to approximately 100%? They left out some of the larger demographics (indigenous, and arab/Middle-Eastern are both larger populations than Black or Hispanic in my country).
On another note I passed a particularly bizarre question about x and y random groups and wanted to go back. Can’t do this, so I ended up taking the quiz over again and screen shot a few of my (least) favorite questions. And I noticed complete willingness to answer differently on some questions and confidently the same on others.
I wonder if I’m more concerned about this grapefruit that’s missing from my fruit bowl.
I would be more interested to hear from commenters who got a poor score on the test.
Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field” comes to mind.
Resiliently optimistic is better. Reminds of me of the Stockdale Paradox:
"You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale#The_Stockdale_...
https://yalesurvey.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1XOUyQ4Ux6deFBH
I took it and got a 36/40. I have taken one intro to social psych course after taking gen psych.
"Fantastic! Your score was better than approximately 99.5% of other people's scores. You have the ability to accurately infer how most people feel, think, and behave in social context without a background or little background in social psychology. In a way, you seem to be very good at capturing human's 'social nature'. This skill, which we call social psychological skill, has been linked to intelligence, a willingness to engage in complex thinking, melancholy, and introversion."
I think some of the questions I remember learning about in psych 101, like the bystander effect, but the ones I was surprised that I had intuition for were the questions that asked about how other people deal with strong negative emotions and what works for coping.
I think it's interesting that the article frame this skill as something that people in positions of power need but at the same time being introverted to begin with means people are less likely to try to attain those kinds of positions. I wonder if it'll continue to be a weakness of current governance long term because people prefer extroverts in those positions.
I also think it's worth mentioning the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie as a way to become better at some of the things people in the comment section are bringing up as an area that needs improvement for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...