Statistical personality quiz matches you to fictional characters

The Open-Source Psychometrics Project, which seems to have been around for a while, provides personality quizzes as an exercise in data collection and personality education:

This website has been offering a wide selection of psychological assessments, mostly personality tests, since late 2011 and has given millions of results since then. It exists to educate the public about various personality tests, their uses and meaning, the various theories of personality and also to collect data for research and develop new measures. This website is under continuous development and new tests and information are being added all the time.

One of the more recent quizzes matches your personality with fictional characters, and the results seem oddly close? I took the short version, and out of 2,000 characters, I was a 92% match to Data from Star Trek. I’m not totally sure how I feel about that.

You can also download anonymized data collected through the project.

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Quiz to see which Democratic candidate agrees with you most

The Washington Post asked Democratic candidates a series of policy questions. To see which one agrees with you most, the Post made a quiz:

Now, it’s your turn to answer. Below are 20 questions we found particularly interesting, mostly because they reveal big differences between the remaining major candidates. We haven’t asked the campaigns about every topic, but this selection tries to cover a variety of issues. Answer as many as you like.

It was also a good way to catch up on what candidates currently stand for. I’ve found it hard to keep up lately.

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Predicting whether you are Democrat or Republican

The New York Times is in a quizzy mood lately. Must be all the hot weather. Sahil Chinoy shows how certain demographics tend towards Democrat or Republican, with a hook that that lets you put in your own information. A decision tree updates as you go.

Reminds of the Amanda Cox decision tree classic from 2008.

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A quiz to see if you’re rich

In a compare-your-preconceptions-against-reality quiz, The Upshot asks, “Are you rich?” Enter your nearest metro area, income, and what you consider to be rich. See where you actually land.

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Personality quiz with traits on a spectrum

Ah, the online personality quiz, oh how I missed you. Oh wait, this one is slightly different. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker and Julia Wolfe provide a quiz used by psychologists to gauge personality traits:

First, the Big Five doesn’t put people into neat personality “types,” because that’s not how personalities really work. Instead, the quiz gives you a score on five different traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, negative emotionality and openness to experience. For each of those traits, you’re graded on a scale from 0 to 100, depending on how strongly you associate with that trait. So, for example, this quiz won’t tell you whether you’re an extravert or an introvert — instead, it tells you your propensity toward extraversion. Every trait is graded on a spectrum, with a few people far out on the extremes and a lot of people in the middle.

Dang it. I really wanted to know what Harry Potter character I am.

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Draw the patterns of Obama’s presidency

A couple of years back The New York Times asked readers to draw on a blank plot the relationship between income and college attendance. It was a way to get you to think about your own preconceptions and compare them against reality. The Times recently applied the same mechanic to the changes during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Bonus: Here’s how to make your own you-draw-it graph.

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Looking for America’s heartland

By definition, heartland is some central place of importance of a country. But ask people where to find America’s heartland, and the actual boundaries of this so-called area grows fuzzy. The Upshot asks its readers the same question with a multiple-choice poll.

First, it gets you to think about your concept of the heartland. Second, it provides a baseline to compare against others. Third, it goes into more detail for each option. And by the end, well, you still don’t quite know where the heartland is, but at least you learn something.

I have a feeling we’ll see this story format more this year.

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Numbers quiz tests how well you know your country

In their annual survey that tests public perception against reality, Ipsos Mori asked people about their own country's numbers. What's the obesity rate in your country? What percentage of people in your country are immigrants? The Guardian setup the quiz so that you can see how your own perceptions compare against both reality and others' in your country.

Stat quiz

After each question, you get the actual (estimated) value, and you can compare all countries in a second view. Some countries overall are better than others, which you see at the quiz end. Fun.

I'm curious what the distributions look like and what the margin of error is. Are the countries that rank low uninformed, such that survey answers are all over the place, or is the perception universally off, such that answers tightly cluster around the average?

Essentially: uninformed versus misinformed.

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How stolen data affects you

Hacked

You typically hear about data breaches in terms of number of records that were hacked. "A million email addresses were stolen" or "hackers ripped off 100,000 passwords." Does anyone care? After the initial gasp-shock-horror, we move on and everyone forgets until the next time it happens.

However, if a hack affects you in some way, you pay closer attention. That long random string password reminds you every time you log in somewhere.

That's the idea behind this quiz from the New York Times. Answer a few quick questions. See the potential information bits about you that were stolen in the past couple of years.

It's a good spin on the record tally, and leads you right in to privacy tips and more information about each hack.

Give it a try.

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