I’ve never met a true-false test I liked. What, after all, is 100 percent true? And what is completely false?
I like to chalk up the brain freeze to superior analytical thinking but have a secret fear. Maybe I’m just a complicator. Someone who can take the stuff of everyday life, question it to death and transform it into a moral dilemma.
Take something simple. Dog is man’s best friend. True or false? Not true for me personally. I don’t have one. But maybe for dog owners, and possibly not even for them, depending on the dog and the day. And what does this say about other friendships, say with humans?
The real fun came when I started taking positive psychology classes and started taking batteries of these tests to unearth my real personality. Was I a positive or negative thinker? Satisfied with life? And what were my top five strengths and values? With just 240 online questions, all would be revealed.
“It won’t take more than 40 minutes,” the professor assured us.
But I did the math, and quickly figured out that I was not zipping along at 10 seconds per question.
For example, I never quit a task before it’s done. Was that very much like me? Like me? Neutral? Unlike me? Not at all like me?
Guiltily, I remembered the parts of the to-be-stuffed bear that have slept unfinished in a guest room closet for 22 years. “Not very much like me,” I confessed, and was glad, at least, that I’d never confessed this to my late mother, who would have been appalled.
Or I never dread getting up in the morning.
“There’s not a soul on earth who doesn’t dread getting up on some mornings,” I told my daughter, a psych major and defender of such tests. But then I began to worry because I have a secret suspicion that such people do exist. Not only do they not dread getting up. They jump into cold showers at 4:30 a.m., towel off and go for a run.
After debating whether hitting the snooze was the same as dreading, I decided that neutral – whatever that means – was probably the easiest answer. Same with I never get sidetracked when I work and I think through the consequences every time I act. Obviously not, or I would have started the blasted test a couple of days before. But still, I picked “neutral” because it would keep me from getting sidetracked by wondering about being sidetracked and suffering the consequences.
The real puzzler, though, had to do with being a phony. Was I willing to say I’d rather die than be one? Because that was the statement: I’d rather die than be phony. Really? Die? That seemed a little heavy. And yet, I really don’t like being phony. And if I answered “Very much like me,” wouldn’t that be phony? In fact, wouldn’t that be phony for anyone? So maybe it was a trick question, one of those thrown in to ferret out how honest you are. I put, not surprisingly, “neutral,” hit “Submit” and awaited the results, only to find that my Number One strength is Curiosity.
I can’t help but wonder why.
Copyright 2012 Pat Snyder
