Re: Questionairs used to Indoctrinate Followers

I'm in Melbourne Australia, where the Scientologists run a similar operation to that described in Perth. Some years ago, seeking entertainment, I and three friends went and did one of their "personality" tests. Although I am now an engineer, in past times I did a psychology degree, so I was quite interested to see how this test was constructed. It was a fairly standard test, with 10 matched pairs of questions in each of 10 seperate scales. I attempted to portray a personality with rather indifferent attitudes to others welfare and ethics, a bit of a prick really. The young lady who processed my test completely failed to realise that scores at the limits on most scales in the test are a very good indication of a faked test and took the result at face value, despite the fact that my behaviour and demeanour did not in any way accord with the results which she showed me. In each case, we were told that we had personality deficits/failings which Scientologists could help us address, would we like to look further into this... All in all, we were rather entertained, my friends were also interested to see how such a test is structured and scored.

The people scoring the tests clearly did not understand their construction and were not able to properly analyse the results. They were reluctant to discuss their beliefs and even claimed that they were not a religion, (I argued at great length with one about how an organisation could call itself a church without being a religion).

I must go back again for another try, it was really quite entertaining, and having lurked round here for a while I now have a better idea of what they're up to... But I wouldn't go near them in anything other than a clear and happy state of mind with a clear understanding that I'm there for the entertainment.

Perhaps I'll do the IQ test this time, I seem to do all right at those, so perhaps I should aim for an IQ of about 85. See if they can work out that people with an IQ of 85 aren't usually as articulate as I manage to be.

Just to reiterate, these people don't have any idea what the (apparently reasonably well constructed) tests they administer mean, or how the several mechanisms built into a personality test to detect attempted deception work, despite how straightforward it is to detect faked answers. Go and have some fun, watch out for pairs of questions with the same meaning, but one worded negative, the other positive. Try to contradict yourself on as many of these pairs as you can. If they don't check the consistency measure which will show this up you should come across as very average, which is not normal, none of us are average on all of ten different scales.

Enough ranting from me, have fun. Zebedee.