These tests are always just a way of trying to convince people to join that group. The questions are so skewed they’re impossible to answer if you don’t think like they do.
For example, the first question is:
If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.
To a libertarian like me, this is a nonsensical question impossible to answer. The fallacy of the excluded middle rears its ugly head: What if trans-national corporations actually benefit humanity? They generally do, you know. So the question is impossible to answer.
I’d always support my country, whether it was right or wrong.
No one believes this, even people who say, “My country, right or wrong.” The uber-patriots on the right have no problem criticizing America when it’s being run by Democrats. And vice versa.
Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.
Huh? How is racism remotely related to left-right political views? Oh, I know the LEFT thinks that racists exist only on the right, but it’s just not true. And in any event, no one is likely to answer this in the affirmative, which will then skew their results towards the desired outcome.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
Again, WTF? Are they saying that this attitude is more associated with the right than with the left? Or with authoritarians vs liberals? This question is more about political pragmatism than anything else. Certainly the left and right have both been willing to overlook/excuse human rights abuses by governments that generally align with them or who oppose a common enemy. The U.S. allied with Stalin in WWII. Is that a right-wing thing or a left-wing thing?
There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment.
Here’s one of those questions that I’ll bet everyone, right and left, agrees with, and yet answering in the affirmative probably pushes you more towards their desired outcome.
Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.
Another excluded-middle fallacy, unless you can point me to a nation that has high inflation and a healthy economy with full employment. Controlling inflation is one of the requirements for controlling unemployment, but this test won’t let you make that distinction.
What’s good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us.
Here they’ve added the wording ‘always’ that will prevent even people who support corporations from answering in the affirmative. If instead they had said “usually” or “generally”, they would have gotten more nuanced answers, and answers across a broader political spectrum. My guess is that they don’t want that, so they asked a loaded question.
Astrology accurately explains many things
WTF?
I could go on. Rather than looking at a test like this as an accurate test of where you stand on some universal axis of values, you should look at it as an exercise in propaganda. The same goes for the libertarian and conservative versions of these tests that float around on the internet.
I did take the test, and scored:
Economic Left/Right: 6.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.31
Which is fairly accurate. But that’s because I ‘gamed’ it by figuring out which nonsensical answers would skew left and which would skew right.
BTW, just for yucks I went back and changed the answer on astrology from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’, to see how it would affect the output. It changed my Social Libertarian/Authoritarian score from -4.31 to -3.85. I guess the authors think that believing in astrology makes you more authoritarian. In my experience, more people who believe in astrology are on the hippy left than the churchgoing right, but whatever…