Problem with those political compass tests is that at best, they struggle to accurately pin people who don’t just adhere to a party line and actually think of themselves. According to that compass I’ve flip-flopped between the Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left and Libertarian Right in the past few months alone, when really my overall values have remained consistently liberal (by which I mean Classic English Liberalism, not whatever that thing Americans call a liberal is) for years. 8-Values tends to be better because it has more axis to work with, but even then it’s not ideal.
The more damning thing however is that these tests are made by people with clear ideological biases, The Political Compass test in particular is designed to focus anyone who doesn’t want to give a clearly stupid answer to the questions towards the Libertarian Left side of the axis, which skews the results.
For example: when I took it a few years ago, the question pertaining to religiosity/spiritual beliefs asks if you believe in horoscopes. Something so bloody retarded only new-age hipsters would answer “yes” to that.
Questions like that wildly shift the results in ways that honest questions would not. Every time someone presents me their Political Compass result and it’s in the green square, my answer is: “Congratulations, you gave the ‘not retarded’ answers to questions so heavily loaded they’d sink a TI-class supertanker. Good for you.”
It’s why I don’t trust the Political Compass test anymore, and 8-Values has been going a similar route I noticed, albeit more slowly. I tried it twice, giving roughly the same answers both times. The first time it correctly identified me as slightly right-of-centre, the second time it called me far right. Even though my answers where the same on both occasions, the only difference was the amount of time passing.
It could be that they’re changing their definitions of these terms in accordance with the Media’s Overton Window, but I doubt that. Bottom line: I don’t trust the results of those tests, and I would urge everyone to think twice when seeing someone else post their results.
You want to get an accurate sense of where someone stands? You just gotta ask them. Nuff said.