Brain and Body

Take These Scientific Questionnaires to Measure Your Personality, Morality, and Political Views

June 15, 2016 | Kelly Tatera

The Thinker sculpture
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Plus, your participation will help the researchers amass data.

The personality quizzes on Buzzfeed can be a fun way to waste time, but there’s really no science behind the results.

A team of researchers who study morality, politics, and personality collaborated to create a website — YourMorals.org — where people can come to learn something new about themselves while also helping scientific research along.

“Our mission is to conduct scientifically rigorous research on moral and political psychology, and then to apply our findings to improve the functioning of institutions, relationships, and individual lives,” the website states.

After taking a couple minutes to create an account, you’ll have access to a number of questionnaires under the “Explore Your Morals” tab.

SEE ALSO: Here's a Personality Test with Actual Scientific Basis

From scales that assess your creativity, satisfaction with life, and self-compassion to questionnaires that measure attitudes towards Democrats and Republicans and knowledge of US gun laws — there’s a lot to dive into.

Peter Ditto, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine and one of the website’s creators, tells The Science Explorer that the goal of the site is to “amass a huge dataset over the years where all these things will link together.”

Since the website’s creation back in 2007, Ditto says, “it became this huge data matrix, which now has the responses of something like 700,000 people in there.”

He says there’s as many as 40 to 50 studies to get involved with at any time, and the questionnaires tend to be short, only requiring 5 or 10 minutes at most.

After each test is completed, users will receive feedback that tells them exactly what the scale means and how their responses compared to the average responses in the pool. For instance, taking a political survey will tell you how your responses match up to other liberals and conservatives who have also taken the questionnaires.

Plus, you can create groups on the website, so students in high school or college psychology classes could see how their responses relate to those of their peers.

“We’re hoping if people come, they’re curious to find out a little bit about themselves,” says Ditto.

To check out all of the personality questionnaires available on the site now, head over to www.yourmorals.org.

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