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Psy-Q: Test Your Psychological Intelligence

Ben Ambridge                              ★★★★★

Research carried out at the University of the Holy Cow, Wisconsin,
shows that 73 per cent of people who voluntarily undergo psychological
assessment tests are either ‘extremely’ or ‘wholly’  self-absorbed, and
that, of these, 81 per cent were previously either ‘bored stiff’ or
‘bored silly’.

Did you believe that first paragraph?

Tick YES if you did, and NO if you
did not.

BLOT TWO

What it tests: how you are likely to manage anger.

What Craig saw: ‘Two Men in Hats Doing a High Five’, implying he is a lover not a fighter.

What others see: two men wrestling, bears, elephants

Further tests carried out over a five-year period by the
Percival Daft Institute of Psychology in Moonee Ponds found that 78 per
cent of those who ticked YES could be classified as ‘easily led’ and, of
these, 92 per cent were ‘extremely gullible’.

A psychology lecturer at Liverpool University called Ben Ambridge has
had the bright idea of compiling a book packed full of psychological
tests for the general reader, complete with his own snappy assessments
and explanations.

Ambridge explains in his introduction that this is ‘not some dry, dusty
psychology textbook, filled – as most are – with details of long, boring
experiments and Byzantine theories’.

Instead, he promises, ‘you’ll be surprised, delighted, amazed, amused, frustrated, horrified and downright baffled’.

As psychologists go, Ambridge is closer to Tony Blackburn than Sigmund
Freud.

His style is relentlessly chatty: Ambridge by name, Ambridge by
nature.

He constantly interrupts himself with interjections such as
‘Stop sniggering at the back,’ ‘Phew, difficult isn’t it?’ and even
‘Oooh, Matron!’

Some pages are entirely blank but for a single joke.

‘How many clinical
psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?’ he asks in big type
at the top of page 23. The answer is printed upside-down at the
bottom: ‘One, but the light bulb has to want to change.’

Some of his tests are almost as old as his jokes.

The very first chapter
is devoted to the Rorschach Test, which he describes as ‘almost
certainly the most famous psychological test ever’.

BLOT SIX

What it tests: subconscious attitudes to sexuality.

What Craig saw:
an ‘Aztec Priest’, meaning unknown.

What others see: male or female sex
organs, rugs, animal hides.

It consists of a
series of ten ink blots; readers are invited to write down what they see
in each blot, before turning over the page to find out what their
answers say about them.

What could be more fun? I had often heard about the Rorschach Test –
which Ambridge, with his unforgiving jocularity, retitles The Raw Shark
Test – but I had never had a go at it, so was keen to  get started.

Underneath the first blot, I wrote ‘Mad Pig’, under the second, ‘Two Men
in Hats Doing a High Five’ and so on, up to the tenth, which I saw as
‘A Queen on a Throne with High Steps’.

And so to the answers. The first blot, which I had gone to the trouble
of identifying as a mad pig, turned out to be ‘really just a warm-up and
has fairly obvious responses that don’t actually say anything about
you. Is it a bat, a butterfly or a moth? It doesn’t matter’.

This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. What is the point of filling in a
form if you are then told that it is ‘really just a warm-up’, or, in
other words, a complete waste  of time?

Rather too many of the tests contained this sort of answer. The only
response is  to grit your teeth and go on to the next in the hope of
something better.

My answer ‘Two Men in Hats Doing a High Five’ to blot number two turned
out to be rather more encouraging.

If I had spotted two men fighting, it
would have meant that I had ‘angry or aggressive tendencies’, so
imagining them doing a high five at least absolved me from any charge of
violence.

Blot number six, underneath which I had confidently written ‘Aztec Priest’, turned out to be what Ambridge calls ‘a sex card’.

‘Oh, come on, use your imagination!’ he adds. Looking at it again, I
could see what he meant, but I still preferred my Aztec Priest.

‘If you
said animal skin or rug, you might be trying to repress your sexuality,’
he says. He doesn’t say anything about an Aztec Priest.

Perhaps it
means that I am not just trying to repress my sexuality but also trying
to found an ancient religion upon it. Either way, it must surely mean
that I’m more interesting than someone who just put ‘rug’.

And so to blot number seven, against which I put ‘Two Gormless Girls in a
Railway Carriage’. Number seven is, it emerges, ‘often called the
mother card’.

‘So what did you see?’ asks Ambridge. ‘Two angels? Good. Two witches?
Not so good.’

BLOT SEVEN

What it tests: your true feelings about your mother. Deprecating
descriptions indicate that those feelings aren’t good.

What Craig saw:
‘Two Gormless Girls in a Railway Carriage’.

What others see: almost
everyone sees two girls or women.

Again, he says nothing about two gormless girls, but I
suppose they come somewhere in between – not as bad as witches but on
the other hand not as good as angels.

He concludes by saying: ‘If you didn’t see women at all, this may
reflect some difficulty in getting close to the women in your life.’ So
at least I hadn’t fallen at the first hurdle.

There are a hundred or so different  tests in Psy-Q. Most of them are
fun to do, though one or two require a bit too much time and effort for
the casual reader. 

‘First listen to Mozart’s Sonata For Two Pianos In D Major,’ Ambridge
asks at one point, as the preliminary to one of the tests, and in
another, called ‘Hitler’s Sweater’, he tells the reader to ‘take an
empty water bottle and, using a marker pen, write “POISON XXX” on it,
and draw a skull and crossbones. Then fill it with tap water and drink
it.’

How many readers will actually go to these lengths?

Figures provided by
the Department of Bogus Statistics at the Craig Brown Centre for Dodgy
Psychology suggest that up to 98.7 per cent will simply nod it through,
though, of these, anything up to 39 per cent may feel a residual sense
of guilt in so doing.

Nevertheless, like virtually all of the chapters,
‘Hitler’s Sweater’ still manages to make an intriguing point.

It begins, as always, with a question: ‘Are you an atheist? If so, then
presumably you will have no problem reading aloud the following
statements:

‘I dare God to paralyse my mother.

‘I dare God to make me die of cancer.

‘I dare God to make me be in a car crash.

‘Can you do it?’

The answer begins, ‘It’s pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it?’

Ambridge then, characteristically, points us in the direction of ‘a
study conducted at the University of Helsinki’, which wired participants
up to a machine that measures sweat, and discovered that atheists find
saying these words just as stressy as religious people do.

Additionally, when atheists repeat similar statements, but without
mentioning God (eg ‘I wish my mother was paralysed’), they do not
undergo nearly so much stress. Does this mean they are closet believers?

Tests in other centres of learning – trying to eat scrambled eggs that
have been dyed blue, being asked to wear a garment that was once worn by
an evil mass-murderer – all indicate that, however resolutely rational
and atheistic we may consider ourselves, we are all of us equally prone
to superstition and/or religion.

Ambridge concludes not that Dawkins and co are fibbing when they say they are atheists, but rather that 21st century rationality cannot in a few decades overcome instincts that have evolved in mankind over a period of many thousands of years.

For all its easy-peasy, playful, tick-in-the-box larkiness, Psy-Q makes some very interesting points about the counter-intuitive nature of human psychology, and has a fresh and often iconoclastic take on even the most celebrated experiments.

Though some of the statistics Ambridge quotes strike me as exceptionally shaky – eg ‘surgeons who played video games in their spare time made 32 per cent fewer errors and performed 24 per cent faster than non-players’ – there are many others that appear to be trustworthy, and shine fresh light on obscure areas.

I was particularly intrigued, for instance, by a study of lap-dancing clubs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which revealed that lap-dancers earn an average of $335 (£200) in tips from male gawpers in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, compared to just $185 (£110) during the menstrual phase.

‘We love to think of ourselves as somehow superior to other animals,’ Ambridge concludes, ‘and find it a little unsavoury to be reminded of just how much biology we all share.’

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