All A’s, all B’s or all C’s?

Ever taken a quiz in a magazine where all of the items are clearly putting you into a clear category, which you can already see at the outset, because at the side of the page, you can see: ‘‘If you got all:…’’? Do you start thinking and changing your answers before the end? I know I always picked the answers that got me the result I wanted, and not the result I might otherwise have scored if it hadn’t been so blatantly obvious how the responses would be scored.

It’s probably not entirely a bad thing to be able to consistently be aware of the image your response sends to the scorer. We strive to be consistent in our daily lives, and if only for the benefit of the scorer and the test, so we might try to be consistent in our answers when we recognize them as relevant to one another. And there’s something to be said about how much easier and faster it seems to be to go through a test where you know approximately what to answer almost before you finish the question; if I’ve picked all B’s until now, or stayed in the B’s and the C’s, I’m spending a lot less time reading and weighing my choices.

But maybe being too aware of response consistency is it’s own problem. I know it bugs me when I feel I can manipulate the test to show a perceived desired response (even when I’m thrilled that I’ve been confirmed in my belief that my soul mate is my favorite actor/musician). I start doubting myself, my consistency and my own integrity in my answer choices. Do I really like chocolate more than cheese, or did I pick the precise score of fondue over brie to get the profile I wanted? So I guess it’s a trade off. Barring some truly excellent (necessary) deception on the nature of the task, we have some idea on where we start to fall on tests and it absolutely can skew our perspective. I do think that it would be interesting to see how long or after how many items people start to see a pattern, or get facilitated in their decisions.