Every so often a 'personality' or 'position' tester will pop up on the internet scene and gain popularity. While the accuracy of such tests for determining compatibility regarding complex issues is automatically suspect, it can be interesting to see how you stack up compared to someone else who has taken the same test. So, you can get a sense of how similar my views are to yours are on certain topics if you like...
(I did these a while back so hopefully the links will still work and the questions/outcomes are still similar)
Belief-O-Matic (Religion Selector)
As noted in the selector instructions, it is based on overall similarity, so not all typical tenets apply (even when it says 100 you might not have completely compatible beliefs). As an example, atheists and agnostics are also included as a subset of the Unitarians as well as being a strict category unto themselves.
My results for the religion selector were...
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%) | 1. Unitarian Universalism (100%) |
The description of each belief as the maker(s) of the test seem them are given with the result when you take the quiz.
You hopefully noticed there are *two* result lists. These reflect the range of how I might choose to answer the questions and the relative importance I place on the different questions. In this case the difference between the lists came mainly from choosing "The supreme force is the impersonal Ultimate Reality (or life force, ultimate truth, cosmic order, absolute bliss, universal soul), which resides within and/or beyond all" (right column) instead of "No God or supreme force. Or, not sure. Or, not important" (left column) and suggesting that terible things are caused by "Egoism (self importance) leads to desire, craving, and attachments, which can lead to unwholesome thoughts and behavior, i.e. greed, hate, and violence" (right column) instead of "No supernatural or spiritual reasons. Human nature, psychology, sociology, criminology, etc. explain wrongdoing. Or not sure. Or not important" (left column) and selecting the option that "Doing good works (deeds) and acting compassionately" is necessary.
Political Compass
The results of the political compass are represented on their website as a Cartesian graph, that is, one axis (or line) goes up and down and another axis crosses it perpendicularly going left to right, in effect making four quadrants. The values run from negative numbers to positive numbers on each axis. For the vertical line, anything above its intersection with the horizontal line is a positive number, and below is a negative number. Similarly, anything on the horizontal line left of the intersection with the vertical line is a negative number and to the right of the vertical line is a positive number.
For the political test, the scale from libertarian (-10 being highly libertarian to -1 which is weakly libertarian) to authoritarian (on a +1 to +10 scale) is the vertical axis (the line going up and down). So if your coordinates place you in one of the upper quadrants, then the test had determined you are more authoritarian. If you are in the lower quadrant, the test finds you more libertarian. The higher or lower you are above or below the horizontal line indicates to what degree you are either, from -10 at the bottom to +10 at the top (and of course zero, or centrist, in the middle). In the same way the horizontal axis is divided into the left quadrants (more liberal) and the right quadrants (more conservative), and again the values go from -10 to -1 for degree of liberalism (how far you are to the left of the vertical axis) and +1 to +10 for degree of conservatism to the right of the axis (with centrist again being a value of zero).
Being at the very top of the graph would be values approaching a +10 on the scale of social authority which would be facism. Conversely, at the bottom at -10 would be anarchy. The far left on the economic scale would be at -10 and would be communism. The far right would be fiscal libertarianism at +10. My values came out to be--
Economic Left/Right: -3.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.67
You can see from the crude replica I made of my results from the test's website that these scores place me in the lower-left qudrant, which the test maker's call the "Libertarian Left". According to their comparison chart my score is fairly close to those of Ghandi and the current Dali Lama, for what it's worth. They have Stalin close to the top of the upper-left quadrant and far to the left side of the quadrant, and close to him is Saddam Hussein. At the *very* top of the upper-right quadrant but close to the horizontal line (toward the leftmost part of the quadrant) is Hitler. In the same quadrant, very far to the right but only halfway up from the vertical left/right line is George W. Bush. I suppose they wanted to provide some context for the test results, but I wasn't going to infringe on their trademarked graph result, so use your imagination and visualize little red dots for those leaders.
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