Data Dive: Personality testing

Notice: I've been informed that the data were indeed crawled from a combination Adult & Youth surveys. There is no scientific value here, just a funny plug on the power of numpy, matplotlib and a few lines of bash/awk to take a hack at some data.

The Via Institute on Character offers a fun and informative ~10 min personality test. I was curious about how my results compared to the norm, so I took a little data dive.

Here are some humorous observations from a subset of their rich data-set (N=41513)...

1. People admit to lacking Humility, Self-Regulation and Spirituality.
2. Honesty, Love and Kindness are people's top priorities.
3. Spirituality and forgiveness go (very weakly) hand-in-hand.

Observation #1

People admit to lacking Humility, Self-Regulation and Spirituality.

A priori, I expected the character attributes to have flat distributions (my null hypothesis), a straight line at p=0.04 (1/24 attributes). This couldn't be further from the truth for some attributes. 

In the upper-right hand corner of some images, you'll see a (+) or  (-), this corresponds to a big deviation from the flat null hypothesis.

(+) attributes are ranked higher than expected.

(-) attributes are ranked lower than expected. 

Others, without a marker, are more or less flat, e.g. Curiosity and Humor.

Observation #2

Honesty, Love and Kindness are people's top priorities.

Another slightly more flashy way to view the data is through a rank abundance plot. The  top quartile (ranks 1-6) are dominated by these three attributes: 

Observation #3

Spirituality and forgiveness go (very weakly) hand-in-hand.

Correlation coefficient plots by quartile show some very weak (+/- 0.15-0.2) correlation for top ranked (1st Q) and bottom ranked (4th Q) traits, but virtually none for average ranks (2nd and 3rd Q).

Q1 (Top Ranked attributes):

+) Spirituatlity / Forgiveness

+) Humor / Prudence+Perspective

-) Perseverance / Social Intellegence

-) Creativity / Gratitude

-) Curiosity / Perspective

-) Perspective / Creativity+Humility 

Q4 (Bottom ranked attributes):

+) Prospective / Hope+Humor

-) Appreciation / Forgiveness

-) Creativity / Humility

Note that correlation does not imply causality and the correlations, are very weak. They are, however, above the background average correlation of -0.02. These are humorous insights, and in no way should they be taken seriously.

Your Homework

Take the test for youself at viacharacter.org

If you're keen to explore, redacted datasets (taken down at the request of the VIA Institute on Character) and analysis scripts available at https://github.com/rmharrison/viacharacter-analysis