I scored -1.5/-3.74, which feels about right, but I wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling. If I didn’t like any of the four choices (and there were more than a few questions for which I didn’t), I may have picked the answer that I felt was closest to a liberal/libertarian view, just to put myself where I want to be.
As for the question “Religion and morality are closely linked”, can anyone disagree with that? The concept of “sin” is universal, after all. If it was phrased “Morality comes out of religion” or “Religion is founded on morality” I would have a strong position, but as worded all I can do is agree.
My results were economic -5.38, social -0.15. I haven’t spent enough time thinking about my views on some of these issues in general to have anyway of judging its accuracy with respect to my views. Being so close to the middle socially did amuse me though.
Another conservative - libertarian type checking in.
I have taken the test a couple times (although I don’t have the time to do it again now). I have always found it to be biased to the left.
I find myself forced to hold my nose while I make some of the choices on the test because they are worded to be harsh towards conservative ideology.
I always had the impression that the authors of the test didn’t intend it to be biased against conservatives, they just didn’t understand conservative positions very well. MHO, of course.
This is a pretty basic statistics deal. Phrasing of a question can determine the result of a poll rather easily… even something as basic as “Should gay marriage be illegal” versus “Should homosexual couples be allowed to marry” can result in different outcomes due to word use (in this case, the more aggressive “gay” and “illegal” versus “allowed”). In this light, pretty much every poll is biased.
I’m afraid that
is an example of what the test may have been written to do. In fact, simply using the word “authoritarian” represents a cultural bias in the test’s outlook.
A more fair way of doing this would be to extend the test’s questions to 120, and ask questions phrased in opposites of each other scattered around the test, then comparing the inverse scores of those questions.
For instance, proposing, “The government has a duty to provide for the health welfare of its people,” but also proposing, “Government health care results in lower standards” (I don’t know, I’ve just demonstrated my own bias with how hard it was to come up with a counter-proposition).
Further, statements like, “marijuana should be legalized” are terribly loaded. There should be a statement of intent, as there is in, “gar marriage is immoral.”
economic -3.25 / social -6.10 here.
I really can’t say if that’s accurate. I always thought I was a fiscal moderate by American standards, but, according to that, I’m WAY left, comparitively. Social I’ll buy, though. I do think the questions that have a slant tend to be toward the left, so this test probably isn’t the best. Ideally, I think it should have at least 100 questions or so, and 5 or more choices for each question… but I’d guess that it comes close enough.
BTW, I took it a second time (a day after the first), and got a nearly identical score… but not completely identical. I think it might be more accurate if you took it once a week for a month or so and averaged the scores, so those ones that you kinda felt two responses worked for would get averaged out.
I strongly disagreed. I guess it’s in the interpretation of the question. I mean, I believe that many people link religion and morality, but I don’t personally believe there’s any true link; there are moral and amoral theists, just as there are moral and amoral atheists. I don’t see there being any true link.
I’ve taken this test a couple of times, and I score almost everywhere depending on how I think about the question. I think myself conservative, middle of the road type, but I often find myself more liberal than my democrat friends, e.g. don’t look down on abortion, give more to charity and homeless people, pretty cynical about the church a lot (though i rarely miss church). I took it as fast as I could, only strongly reacting to those questions which clicked something inside me. From what I recall, this is what I got: Economic Left/Right: 0.2 (actually, I think it was 0.0); Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: .45. The graph had the dot in just one line up from dead center. Do I agree? I’m not sure. I don’t like some things that the current adminstration is doing, like the pandering to the religious right regarding the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. But, I think the war was a good thing, and the economy isn’t as bad as people say – I’ve been laid off twice for almost a year in the last 4 years, and I’m doing fine. I’ll buy a house, and hopefully start my own firm.
I do like the test because it forces no middle of the road answer. But, the questions, imo, require too much thinking or are too loaded on the premise. The test makes you answer all the questions, where there are some where I would have left blank. Don’t tell me that someone has an opinion, informed or not, on every issue? Since there is no room for a neutral answer, the question has to be asked in a provacative answer to elicit a response. Unfortunately, us irrational humans don’t always respond the same way.
I’ve taken this test a couple of times, and I score almost everywhere depending on how I think about the question. I think myself conservative, middle of the road type, but I often find myself more liberal than my democrat friends, e.g. don’t look down on abortion, give more to charity and homeless people, pretty cynical about the church a lot (though i rarely miss church). I took it as fast as I could, only strongly reacting to those questions which clicked something inside me. From what I recall, this is what I got: Economic Left/Right: 0.2 (actually, I think it was 0.0); Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: .45. The graph had the dot in just one line up from dead center. Do I agree? I’m not sure. I don’t like some things that the current adminstration is doing, like the pandering to the religious right regarding the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. But, I think the war was a good thing, and the economy isn’t as bad as people say – I’ve been laid off twice for almost a year in the last 4 years, and I’m doing fine. I’ll buy a house, and hopefully start my own firm.
I do like the test because it forces no middle of the road answer. But, the questions, imo, require too much thinking or are too loaded on the premise. The test makes you answer all the questions, where there are some where I would have left blank. Don’t tell me that someone has an opinion, informed or not, on every issue? Since there is no room for a neutral answer, the question has to be asked in a provacative answer to elicit a response. Unfortunately, us irrational humans don’t always respond the same way.
To make people ashamed of what they think? If I believed that benefitting corporations is the surest way to benefit humanity in general, why on earth would I feel ashamed to disagree with the first question, “If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations”?
Please elaborate.
Maybe.
How? How would you phrase this so it wasn’t “loaded”? What position is it loaded towards?
There’s no question that changing the question subtly can change the way people answer. But would it change it so much so that you’d be entirely in the wrong quadrant? As a matter of self-identification I’d put myself at -5, -10; I feel very strongly that their score is a much better estimate of my “true” position than I am as a self-appraiser.
I forget my exact score, but I fall well into that Southeast desert that seems to only contain Milton Friedman. Then again I can hardly imagine better company so I can’t complain too much. As I answered the questions I had the tendency to change the wording in my mind to make some of the more blindingly obvious questions a bit more nuanced. This undoubtedly moved me further into my quadrant than if I had answered every questions literally as asked.
One would expect that I would be a Libertarian given my score. I have many of those tendencies, but I am voting for Kerry. What the test didn’t capture, and indeed wasn’t designed to capture, is how strongly I felt about each issue raised. For me the social axis was much more important than the economic one. I would vote for an economically left politician, and I have, before I would vote for a socially conservative one.
This remains better than most tests at quantifying one’s tendencies. I have moved from the southwest to the southeast over the yearsand wonder what my score will look like ten years from now.
Because it makes the serving of humanity seem a completely different case than the interests of trans-national corporations, which is not necessarily true. Also, the term “serve humanity” is loaded. It implies that a trans-national corporation will not serve humanity - it would be better phrased differently. Further, implying that multi-national corporations should serve humanity could be taken to indicate a level of communism.
Word association. Most Americans will associate “authoritarian” with “Nazi” of “fascist.” If you wanted to do it fairly on that level, they would be Communist/Free Market for economic and Authoritarian/Anarchist for social. Or something to that effect.
So you suggest replacing authoritarian with authoritarian because the word “authoritarian” is loaded?
It doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s a question of priorities, not of the relationship between the two. The only people who should have any problem answering this question are people who feel it is completely irrelevant whether we focus on humanitarian gains or corporate gains. Everyone else should easily fall to one side. Those who feel the best way to help humanity is to focus on corporate interests have their answer in hand; those who feel that corporations are not the best way to help humanity have their answer in hand.
Well, that’s how I feel. It doesn’t matter whether the economy helps humanity or corporations. It isn’t necessary that corporations as they are now would even exist in some other society. The idea of limited liability certainly would not fit in with Libertaria.
As for how much do I like government, that’s another pretty loaded question. If it does what it is supposed to, I love it with all my heart. If it is tyrannical, I hate it with all my being. How is assigning a categorical degree of affectation for government to me at all relevant?
And where are the other threads Sentient mentioned?
I think you misunderstood my point. My point was that, if you are going to use a word like authoritarian to define one aspect, you might as well use similarly loaded words to define the other aspects. Maybe people who would not mind being in the Libertarian sphere would object to being in the Anarchist sphere, and many who would be happy in the Left sphere would hesitate to associate themselves with Communism.
This has been dealt with over and over. There is at most one question which is never even explicitly worded as such; do you agree or disagree with these propositions and how strongly? The propositions are biased and the test judges you based on how you deal with this bias according to your level of agreement.
is horribly biased ie. horrible because I strongly disagree. That is the aim though. What would be the point of bland, uncontroversial propositions? What descriptive value would level of agreement to a statement like all children should learn to read and write have? How many Western, anglophone people are going to dissent or have varying views on this?
Sorry, propositions. I misspoke (or, well, mistyped).
The problem is that one might say “strongly disagree” or “disagree”, but really mean that they think it should be illegal unless she was raped or something (as my numbers above probably indicate, my personal view on that one is an unequivocal “strongly disagree”).
I agree with Zagadka that a much better version would include more questions, and mix in “Abortion should always be legal” as one of the propositions. I think asking the user to comment on the proposition posed in both directions would give a more accurate score (I don’t know their exact scoring method, however, so I could be wrong ).
Another thing that I think might improve the test would be for them to let you rate the test at the end. I’d personally have given it something like “sure, looks about right to me,” but there must be some way that feedback would let them improve the test…
).