Among the serious questions, there are also some questions like this, where you are almost certain that the “nice” answer is a lie.
On the Crowne-Marlowe scale, it looks to me (having found a copy online and taken it) like most of the questions are of this form. When I answered all of the questions honestly, I scored 6, which according to the test, indicates that I am “more willing than most people to respond to tests truthfully”; but what it indicates to me is that, for all but 6 out of 33 questions, the “nice” answer was a lie, at least for me.
The 6 questions were the ones where the answer I gave was, according to the test, the “nice” one, but just happened to be the truth in my case: for example, one of the 6 was “T F I like to gossip at times”; I answered “F”, which is the “nice” answer according to the test—presumably on the assumption that most people do like to gossip but don’t want to admit it—but I genuinely don’t like to gossip at all, and can’t stand talking to people who do. Of course, now you have the problem of deciding whether that statement is true or not. :-)
Could a rationality test be gamed by lying? I think that possibility is inevitable for a test where all you can do is ask the subject questions; you always have the issue of how to know they are answering honestly.
On the Crowne-Marlowe scale, it looks to me (having found a copy online and taken it) like most of the questions are of this form. When I answered all of the questions honestly, I scored 6, which according to the test, indicates that I am “more willing than most people to respond to tests truthfully”; but what it indicates to me is that, for all but 6 out of 33 questions, the “nice” answer was a lie, at least for me.
The 6 questions were the ones where the answer I gave was, according to the test, the “nice” one, but just happened to be the truth in my case: for example, one of the 6 was “T F I like to gossip at times”; I answered “F”, which is the “nice” answer according to the test—presumably on the assumption that most people do like to gossip but don’t want to admit it—but I genuinely don’t like to gossip at all, and can’t stand talking to people who do. Of course, now you have the problem of deciding whether that statement is true or not. :-)
Could a rationality test be gamed by lying? I think that possibility is inevitable for a test where all you can do is ask the subject questions; you always have the issue of how to know they are answering honestly.