Navigation
Search
New Comments
Handy Links
Syndication
« Link and Run #5 (7/20/07) | Main | A Failure to Communicate »
I have the personality of a bunny
On December 7, 2007 by Jamie Madigan
The new movie The Golden Compass is set in a world where part of people's souls (called, perhaps oddly, "demons") live outside their body in animal form. The animal that one's demon imitates is supposed to say something about your personality --more subservient people may have dog demons, while scholarly ones may have owls, and Nichole Kidmans have golden monkeys.
To help promote the movie, the official website has set up a quiz to help you determine what kind of demon YOU would have if you lived in this magical world. The site is in awful full flash animation, so I can't directly link to the quiz but if you go to the site and choose the "demons" tab you'll get to a page where you can choose "meet your demon."
The quiz consists of items that look an awful lot like what you might find on personality tests used in pre-employment testing:
At parties you prefer not to talk to people you don't know.
It doesn't take much to get you fired up.
You usually get your own way.
And so forth. Test-takers are asked to respond to each statement using a standard Likert-type scale of Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.
I took the quiz and my demon is a bunny! And apparently bunnies are "modest, assertive, shy, passive, and responsible." I'm ...not quite sure what to make of that. The quiz is obviously more like a horoscope and less like any kind of scientific test, but I can't help wondering how it was put together and what kind of model it used. There are many different demons that you can get by taking the test different ways so some thought must have gone into it. I wonder if they consulted any kind of real expert? I'm guessing not, but it's interesting to speculate.
As a testing professional, I'm of two minds with something like this. On the one hand, it's fun and kind of cool to see that something like personality testing is getting mainstream enough to be used in this way. On the other hand, it's fairly disheartening to see it treated like a cheap marketing gimmick, and one that's associated with magic and parlor tricks. But then again, we bunnies tend to take things like that seriously.
Existing comments:
Post your own comment:
