Hello again Crasstalkers, lets look at results of our little quiz from yesterday.
Credit where it’s due: the quiz was taken from a book called Snoop by Professor Sam Gosling, an entertaining and informative study on what we can learn of people’s personalities through their offices, bedrooms, trash cans, cars, music collections, job interview behaviors, etc.; in many cases, what we think we can learn but actually can’t.
The quiz, seemingly about our knowledge of various celebrities, was not really about our knowledge of celebrities. You are not about to be shamed for knowing all about Apple Martin while knowing nothing of Hermann von Helmholtz.
The quiz was put to participants in the original study the same way it was put to you and to readers of the book. Patterns in the answer were correlated against personality types of the people in the study, as ascertained through other tests.
Some of the names in the quiz are very well known, such as Princess Diana or Angelina Jolie, and it’s expected most people will give high scores for them. Some of the names are still well known but perhaps not as widely and so scores will vary for those people. Some are obscure. A couple of them don’t exist.
The correlation discovered by the researchers was devastatingly simple: pathological narcissists will claim to have at least heard of every name in the test. Where most people will give a 2 or 3 for a name they think they’ve heard but really know nothing much about, a narcissist will give 5-8. If they know a little about the person, they will probably give the full 10. It’s important to the narcissist to “win” the test and avoid appearing ignorant.
The researchers ran a variant of the test where they warned everyone in advance that some of the names were made up. This reduced the average scores given, as most people became cautious about saying they’d heard of anyone they weren’t absolutely sure of. Except amongst narcissists, whose scores remained just as high as before and who remained just as willing to claim to know about the non-existent people. Most narcissists in the test, when informed they had claimed to know about a non-existent person, argued with the researchers that while the researchers may think T.C. Flutie was made up, T.C. Flutie really did exist and the narcissist really had heard of him, so there.
Professor Gosling adds that while initially the researchers had been worried about how to inform their narcissists of their test results, they discovered it was simply impossible to make pathological narcissists see the results as a bad thing, and recorded one test subject as having left the room and loudly boasting to a waiting friend “I got the top score on the narcissism test!”.
As I am writing this before seeing people’s answers to the quiz, if anyone did give across-the-board 10s: congratulations, you won the narcissism test! You’re awesome!
For everyone else, congratulations, you passed.
If you’re at all interested in what can be told about people from where they place photos on their desk, or what people really look for in job interviews, and what they should be looking for, I recommend Snoop to you.
