How Do You Compare? 12 Simple Tests to Discover Hidden Truths About Your Personality. (Paperback)

by Andrew N. Williams (Author) "While you probably have a pretty good idea of what intelligence is, your description of intelligence may differ from others..." (more)
Key Phrases: happiness filter, creativity test, partner influences, United States, Strongly Strongly Disagree Agree, Susan Hendrick (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
How clever are you? Is your relationship sexy enough? Are you living up to your creative potential?

You can find out in How Do You Compare?, which features twelve of the most interesting, scientifically devised personality tests used by professionals. With these fun quizzes and the thoughtful analysis and self-improvement hints accompanying each one, you will discover more about yourself in a short time than you would by reading stacks of self-help books.

Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of the personality, such as creativity, relationship skills, sexual attitudes, or motivation, and presents the best quiz used by pros to measure it. Once you learn your score and what it means, you can find out how you stack up against thousands of others who took the same test. Chock-full of entertaining trivia, cartoons, and recent study findings from the world of science and social psychology, How Do You Compare? is the first book that uses quizzes as tools for self-discovery.

Want to find out how to improve your sex life, procrastinate less, or become more popular? Taking these twelve tests provides the basic self-help tools to get started:

1. Omni IQ Test. Find out if you're living up to your mental potential by measuring the brainpower you were born with.
2. Wordsmith Creativity Test. Learn how easily your mind can create offbeat links between seemingly unrelated ideas.
3. Creativity Test for Engineers. Test your visual ingenuity and right-brain inventiveness.
4. Relationship Satisfaction Test. Find out how satisfied you are with your lover.
5. Relationship Closeness Inventory. Measure the strength of your relationship.
6. Test of Sexual Opinions. Uncover your true, and hidden, sexual self.
7. Sexual Experiences and Desires Inventory. Identify your likes and dislikes in bed, and whether you're getting what you need. A great tool to share with your partner.
8. Satisfaction with Life Scale. Discover how happy you are with your life so far.
9. Cheerfulness Test. Is your temperament sunny or dark? This test will tell you.
10. Cheerfulness Test for Your Friend. Learn how others rate your disposition.
11. The Peak Experiences Test. Find out if you're living life at full throttle, or holding back more than you should.
12. Internal-External Locus of Control. Are you the boss of your life? Or do you put a lot of stock in fate or luck? Where you fall on the hardworking-lucky spectrum colors every aspect of your personal and professional life

About the Author
Andrew N. Williams is a nationally known experimental psychologist with more than twenty years of experience conducting research studies for academic, government, and private research firms, and has overseen the administration of interviews to over half a million people. He has written dozens of technical reports, authored journal articles, edited a newsletter, and regularly presents papers at international conferences.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Perigee Trade; Perigee Trade Paperback Ed edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399529519
• ISBN-13: 978-0399529511
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #310,127 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and challenging, March 6, 2004

By	Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Ordinarily, I don't read and review self-improvement books. I've read quite a few them in the past and found most of them wanting. Sure, now and then a decent self-help book will come off the press and even I have found it helpful. Most of them, however, are too much the same and intended to either make the author a lot of money or create a new fad, with some self-promoting guru raking in the fame and fortune.

So, when I was offered the opportunity to review "How Do You Compare?", I was hesitant. I wasn't sure I'd be interested in what still another author had to say about improving oneself. But my curiosity was peaked when I learned that the book included twelve simple tests which were based on more complicated tests which had actually been developed and tested themselves by experts in the field of experimental psychology. Since I have a background in testing, evaluation, and quantitative analysis, plus have taken a number of courses in psychology at both the undergraduate and graduate level, I decided, what the heck, I'd read the book and maybe even write a review about it.

"How Do You Compare?" is a very readable book and, in addition to the twelve tests provided, contains a lot of interesting information about the nature, history, and development of various types of evaluation, including intelligent tests, creativity tests, social skills tests, and personality tests in general. Spaced throughout the book, and making the adventure more enjoyable than usual for books in this genre, are cartoons related to the discussion at hand and textual tidbits providing the reader with little-known facts such as the relationship between Graham crackers and sexual behavior. I knew about that one, having heard about Dr. Graham many years ago, but I'd bet most people aren't aware of that peculiar, practically useless, yet very interesting, factoid.

The structure of the book is very simple: get some background information about a part of your mind, take a little test to learn something about yourself, and then compare yourself to thousands of others who have taken the test. The tests are divided into three main sections and a final "big picture" questionnaire with the title, "How satisfied are you with your personality?" The first section includes a brief intelligence test and a test for creativity. The second section includes four tests or sets of questions to check up on your social skills. The third section, which deals with the subject of motivation, includes tests about happiness, cheerfulness, peak experiences, locus of control, and even, -- wouldn't you know it? -- a cheerfulness test for a friend to complete about you.

Most people who take tests such as these are interested in three primary points: How did I score on the test?; What do my answers mean?; How did others score on the test? The author goes into some detail to help the reader, or in this case, the test-taker, deal with these questions. He raises a number of issues related to one's personality profile and suggests possibilities for self-improvement under headings like: Do you have a messy desk?; Can you buy creativity?; Do you drink for inspiration?; Is your date attractive at the end of the night?; and What is your happy life expectancy? -- intriguing questions, these, and the results of the research into them by behavioral scientists may surprise you.

Of course, since the book is within the self-improvement genre, it must also provide some practical advice to help those who want indeed to improve themselves. This it does. At various places throughout the text, the author gives suggestions, both positive and negative, as to how to improve one's performance in life, including the eight ingredients for a successful relationship and, something even I was unaware of, the health benefits of kissing. All my life I thought it was just for fun! Now I know it's healthy, too!

There is one brief discussion the author has in the book that I think especially stands out and I would hope that most of us would pay close attention to it. In the section dealing with intelligence and creativity, he lists what he calls the "creativity killers," those things we say to children, or fail to say, which can impact negatively on a child's ability to become a truly creative individual. As a former educator of young children, I can relate to the importance of this warning.

As self-improvement books go, this one far outdistances most of them I've read. To the credit of the author, and to the advantage of the really serious reader, Williams includes citations for every research paper he mentions so they can be consulted and studied. He also provides an index to the major topics discussed, something not common to books of this type.

Finally, I gladly recommend this book to all who want to learn more about themselves, about how they compare with others, and, above all, how they might go about improving their lives. If you're looking for a self-help book that is based on real scientific research, yet is interesting and fun to read, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything better right now.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Toward a brighter world, March 5, 2004

By	M. L Lamendola (Merriam, KS USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

For me, this book started off on dangerous ground but handled it well. You see, I'm in Mensa (the High IQ Society) and there are some problems with how we are often portrayed in movies or written about in books and periodicals.

And so I'm a little edgy when someone starts talking about intelligence. When Chapter One started talking about Mensa and I saw the subhead, "Are Mensa Members Narcissistic?," I thought, "Here we go again. More negative stereotyping." But, it wasn't that at all. It was actually <gasp> a solid piece of writing that left the reader accurately informed. This whole book is like that. Williams is a researcher, and everything in the book is backed by something other than the opinionated blather that seems to dominate publications today. And that something consists of--well, you can read the book to see what I mean.

Not to dwell on Chapter One, but I have quite a bit of interest in this subject and if I tell you about how well Williams handled Chapter One you will get a feel for the overall quality of the book. Inside Mensa, we geniuses debate all the time about what intelligence is and what genius is. The standard intelligence tests basically address only 7 areas of intelligence--primarily those involve in information processing and reasoning ability. This is a bit myopic.

Why is this myopic? For example, consider an elite athlete.
I'm very much into climbing. After you reach a certain level of conditioning (the hardware), everything else is mental (the software). So, as you climb you become more "intelligent" at climbing.

Michael Jordon was perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. This was not due to his physique, good as it was. Ditto for Muhammed Ali, Dan Gable, Bruce Lee, and many other stars of the athletic world.

If this example of the athlete is not enough for you, consider people who amaze us with their creativity or other talents despite not being known for their math or reading skills:
* Painters: Rembrandt, for example.
* Actors and actresses: Meryll Streep and Cher have given riveting performances that few others could ever achieve.
* Race car drivers: Try one of those race care simulators, and you'll see this job requires some elite brainpower rather than ordinary intelligence.
* Salespeople: Why are some so successful and others not? It's literally all in their heads!
* Craftspeople: Journeyman electricians, stone masons, sheet metal fabricators, tool and die makers, and machinists are geniuses in their trades.

It takes years to become proficient--that is, to develop the intelligence to do these jobs correctly.

The list goes on and on. The point is there are many areas of intelligence our standard tests don't even look at. Just because you don't get a score of X on some standard test doesn't mean you aren't very, very smart. Williams brings this point out and helps readers to really see where they are smart and perhaps why.
Williams takes this same approach in subsequent chapters, addressing such things as how creative you are, how healthy your relationships are, how good a lover you are, and how happy you are. He even has a section that helps you discover where your locus of control is and what that means.

The book contains 12 simple tests. After each test is an explanation that helps you interpret your score. Williams also provides very useful information on how you might address some needed areas of improvement.

How Do You Compare is a good tool for personal assessment. It can help anyone to squelch the negative messages of insufficiency we constantly are bombarded with. And, it can help other people to overcome overestimates of their abilities. But, I think it will primarily help people to take stock of themselves and feel pretty darn good. 

You can use this book to keep yourself mentally and emotionally on track. Perhaps if enough people did, we'd all live in a much brighter world.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and fun book, March 5, 2004

By	Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A fascinating trip into the world of psychology and relationships, "How Do You Compare" is a joy to read. The text examines several areas where we tend to compare ourselves with others. Some of the areas include intelligence quotient, creativity, healthy relationships, ability as a lover, and even if how happy we are. Included are several short tests to help you understand where you stand in each of the areas followed by an analysis of how you then compare to others in the general population. Each section also contains the results of various research projects. These projects answer questions like whether there is a relationship between tall stature and intelligence? What about a relationship between racism and intelligence, or wearing glasses and intelligence? Can music help you fall in love? "How Do You Compare" is a highly recommended an interesting read.