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These are real comments we’ve received on Facebook in recent weeks…
“I am a conservative, but I understand that this is designed to make a lot of people fall into the Libertarian.” - Rich G.
“Libertarian. It's true, but I think the test is designed to make most people libertarians. That's not the way we do things.” - Yami C.
“I already felt libertarian. But when the quiz is hosted by a website called ‘advocates for self government’ I'm not surprised they're trying to convince everyone they felt the same” - David L.
“Biased much?” - Kate W.
We see this feedback every time we advertise The Quiz (World’s Smallest Political Quiz), but it’s simply not true. I want to prove that The Quiz is Balanced, not Biased.
It's important to The Advocates that The Quiz has integrity and produces reliable results.
For one thing, The Quiz is popular in high schools and colleges. We intend to expand that. But teachers won't even let The Quiz in the classroom if this is a rigged tool.
Additionally, we want The Quiz to be widely shared so that everyone in America takes it. Think about it. Will The Quiz be more widely shared if it's balanced or if it's biased?
We believe we benefit from Quiz Balance and are harmed by Quiz Bias.
But talk is cheap. It’s better if I prove it.
My college degree was in economics, so I recognized that econometric data analysis could help us evaluate The Quiz for accuracy and balance. We found a very talented econometrician to help us. Today, I want to share with you what we learned.
First, we added an 11th “self-identification” question" at the end of The Quiz. We asked Quiz Takers, "How do you categorize yourself?" Progressive, conservative, libertarian, etc?
Then, we compared their self-identification answer to their Quiz results as plotted on the diamond-shaped Political Map.
Our sample size was a whopping 130,000 Quiz Takers.
We ran a battery of tests. The print out of the results is 37 pages long!
We discovered that personal categorization and the Quiz result matched...
- 48% of the time for libertarians
- 79% of the time for conservatives
- 55% of the time for progressives
In case you’re wondering, those are positive, encouraging numbers! The higher the percentage, the greater the accuracy or balance we've achieved. But there are reasons it will never be 100%.
First, this is a "discovery" tool. So one of the attractions for Quiz Takers is to learn something about themselves. It's also one of our objectives to help people find their political home. Of course, we appreciate them discovering, often for the very first time, that they're libertarians.
Second, “Maybe” is an answer option, and our Political Map includes a centrist/moderate outcome. These two factors combine to create a "tendency towards the mean." In other words, people on the political left or right find that they're a centrist after a few “Maybe” answers to The Quiz.
Third, hardly anyone declares, “I’m an authoritarian.” They don't see the force behind their political views. Interestingly, 40% of the people who score authoritarian, pre-identified themselves as centrists.
We have many ideas on how to further enhance and refine our testing. In fact, we're likely to implement one of those ideas before the end of the year.
We encourage you to take The World's Smallest Political Quiz, for yourself, right now. Then, please share it with others.
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