Big Personality Test
The Big Personality Test, launched on Mon 23 November, is the second major experiment from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Lab UK website. I'm pleased to say that we didn't get it wrong when we called it Big. More than 100,000 people completed the test in the first two days and the deluge shows no sign of abating.
Lab UK teamed up with Ö÷²¥´óÐã One's Child of Our Time and leading Cambridge academics to deliver a survey that aims to answer the question: do our personalities shape our lives or do our lives shape our personalities? The findings will be revealed in a special series of CoOT in spring/summer 2010.
The Big Personality Test is the second in a trilogy of experiments being delivered by the Lab UK team between September 2009 and February 2010. The first was Brain Test Britain, a full-scale clinical trial that will hopefully tell us whether or not brain training actually works. This is still underway. The third experiment is still being defined, but will be looking at what the internet is doing to our brains.
Despite the development of Lab UK taking place at a truly break-neck speed over the last eight months, we've had to make very few adjustments to our ambitions for the project. And as the Big Personality Test has shown, even where we've not yet delivered the full package to the users, the users are showing a great willingness to fill in the blanks.
For example, we've yet to formally 'socialise' Lab UK with the likes of , et al, but this hasn't been a barrier to users who have been furiously tweeting their Big Five personality traits () and screengrabbing their results graphs for blogs and profiles.
Needless to say, we have plans to actively facilitate the viral spread of future Lab UK experiments through social networks, as well as delivering experiments for under 18s and looking at some interesting data visualisation ideas for user feedback and experiment results. Then there's the rack of exciting experiment ideas we're developing for 2010 onwards, looking at everything from risky business to the science of sound.
Lab UK started out with two big ideas about how to engage the public in mass-participation experiments online. First, we wanted to use science to tell people something meaningful about themselves. Second, we wanted to tap into a more altruistic motive, by asking people to contribute to the greater good by participating in groundbreaking experiments. As any scientist will tell you, nothing is ever proved beyond all doubt, but the initial results are very encouraging.
Richard Cable is part of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Lab UK team.
Comment number 1.
At 27th Nov 2009, albert wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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At 27th Nov 2009, albert wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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At 27th Nov 2009, albert wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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At 27th Nov 2009, john wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 5.
At 5th Dec 2009, morrison wrote:I rellay like this test. I was wondering too, how the little tykes are doing this year, and it is a bit sad to know that only in 2010 there will be a new show about them .
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Comment number 6.
At 4th Jan 2010, jfmulligan wrote:I took the Big Personality test. I am very disappointed that I was unable to get any results.Instead,I was given a prompt that said no results were available for my view.Huh? What gives?
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Comment number 7.
At 22nd Jan 2010, Teasswill wrote:I have been taking part in Brain Test Britain and was amazed at the highest scores recorded by others in my group - until I realised that on my mac the video was running slower & slower. There seems to be no solution to this, so unless I can access a windows PC in future, there's no point in me carrying on with this experiment.
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At 27th Mar 2010, U14390976 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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At 12th May 2010, U14460911 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 10.
At 22nd Jul 2010, Helen Ruef-Ali wrote:how do you compare results with others like my boyfeind?
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