I took personality test — and realised something shocking

Ryan Coogan, The Independent

Growing up, I was often told that I didn’t have much in the way of “common sense”. I was very “book smart”, people would tell me, but I didn’t have it where it counts. At the time, I just thought it was resentment. I was raised in a working-class area and none of the adults in my life were university educated. Surely they were just looking for excuse to elevate their salt-of-the-Earth “real” wisdom — gained from years of hard graft in the mines and what have you — above my fancy book learnin’? Plus, “common sense” is just one of those terms that people use to make themselves feel better about their own inadequacies, but it doesn’t really mean anything… right?

Well, according to a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania, the answer is: sort of. According to researchers who tested participants’ responses to a series of “common sense” statements and maths tests, “collective common sense is rare” and the concept is “to some extent, illusory”.

“Indeed,” the paper’s conclusion states, “if one views common sense as the entire collection of beliefs that an individual holds to be commonsensical, it may be that no individual’s conception of common sense is shared entirely by any other individual.” On the other hand, I took the test myself — and if there is such a thing as common sense, I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t have it. At the very least, I’m beginning to wonder if those friends and relatives were picking up on some quirk of mine, even if we didn’t have a word for it back in the nineties. The test is broken up into three sections. The first evaluates the participant’s responses to a series of “common sense” statements, ranging from the self-evident (“cheating is dishonest”) to the more abstract (“the truth hurts”). Almost immediately, the overthinking started. Of course “regular savings lead to financial stability”. That’s how savings work! Of course “people often nostalgic about their childhood (sic)”, that’s literally the definition of nostalgia! But “Santa Claus brings presents to children on Christmas”? I don’t even know how to begin unpicking that. Does answering in the affirmative imply that I believe in Santa Claus? “Students study for exams”? Well, not all of them do. But they’re supposed to.

Every word of every sentence seemed like it held an infinite number of different interpretations — and it was my job to divine every single one. This test was supposed to take 15 minutes, but I spent five just trying to unpick “beggars can’t be choosers”. The next section contains math problems that seem deliberately designed to trip the reader up. “If an item is on sale for £100 at 20 per cent off, what was its original cost?” Did you say £120? You fool, you rube, it’s obviously… oh, you didn’t? You got it straight away? I’m just bad at math because I haven’t had to do it since I was 16? Well, nevertheless. Seriously though, some of these are tricky, right? Surely it isn’t just me. “A drill and a hammer cost $330 in total. The drill cost $300 more than the hammer. How much does the hammer cost?” If your first thought wasn’t $30 instead of $15, you’re a liar. And I know you’re rushing to the comment section now to tell me how special and clever you are — and how you got it straight away and how I should be tarred and feathered for not knowing basic math, but save it. Get a more fulfilling hobby.

Just as I started thinking to myself, “this is starting to feel an awful lot like an assessment for autism”, the third and final section turned out to be testing my ability to decipher facial expressions from closeup black-and-white pictures of people’s eyes. If that sounds familiar, that’s because they seemed to be taken directly from “Reading the mind in the eyes”, a test developed by the Autism Research Centre to test theory of mind — the ability to understand the mental states of other people, which some autistic people can struggle with. (As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the test was developed by leading autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of Borat and Ali G actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Who made the greater contribution to British culture — the man who helps neurodivergent children, or the “my wife” guy? We may never know.)

I have obsessive compulsive disorder, but I’ve never been tested for other types of neurodivergence, even though my doctor has recommended it in the past. I take things a little too literally, I overthink, I get hyperfixated on certain topics, I struggle with personal relationships and social situations – but that’s just me. Always has been.

I’m not saying that taking what was essentially an online personality quiz is enough for me to suddenly start self-diagnosing with this and that (I think self-diagnosis and pathologising minor personality quirks is one of the great scourges of the internet age) but it definitely has me wondering.

I’ve had friends who have been diagnosed with things like autism and ADHD later in life — and they’ve described the relief they felt at finally being able to put their finger on something that they didn’t even fully realise was hampering their ability to operate in their day-to-day lives. I’ve done pretty well for myself — but imagine how different things would have been if I wasn’t doing so through a haze of anxiety and second-guessing? Or, at the very least, if I had a name for it.