Lifestyle and Attitudes tests

Beyond relatively stable personality traits (the kind the Big Five measures), there are attitudes and cognitive styles that also shape a lot of your day-to-day experience:

• How much certainty you need before deciding.
• Whether your decisions look more to the past, the present, or the future.
• Whether you believe your abilities can be developed or are fairly fixed.
• Whether you tend to expect things to go well or to anticipate what could go wrong.

More flexible than a personality trait

Unlike a personality trait, an attitude tends to be more malleable: it can be trained, it shifts with context and age, and in many cases it varies depending on which area of life is in play. That's why this category isn't trying to box you into a closed label, it's meant to help you spot patterns you actually have room to work on.

How you tend to think it, not just what you think

Researcher Amos Tversky and psychologist (and Nobel laureate in Economics) Daniel Kahneman showed that a good part of our everyday decisions depend less on pure rational calculation than on mental shortcuts and systematic biases: how a question gets framed can change the answer, even when the underlying facts are identical. That idea runs through several of the tests in this category: it isn't just about what you think, it's about how you tend to think it.

Our tests are popular-science, informational takes inspired by real academic research: they don't replace a professional psychological assessment or the original academic questionnaires.

Sources

• Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The Psychology of Closed Mindedness. Psychology Press.
• Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Putting time in perspective: a valid, reliable individual-differences metric. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
• Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1985). Optimism, coping, and health: assessment and implications of generalized outcome expectancies. Health Psychology.
• Seligman, M. E. P. (1990). Learned Optimism. Knopf.
• Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). Defensive pessimism: harnessing anxiety as motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.