Social scientists are idiots if they would predict anything about a person's political leanings based on this test.
It said 55% left, which is way off. I'm more like 80%-85% left.
I just wonder how these definitions arise and how they become accepted as fact.
A lot of what appears to be definitively left or right instead appear to be simply common place or universal values or at least ought to be (and I think actually are whatever anyone says about it).
I dont mean in some semantic sense either, like everyone supports self-reliance but has fundamentally different understandings of what that means, involves or typically looks like. Also some of the juxtapositions or dichotomies seem wrong. Like participatory democracy versus limited government. I could see a very participatory democracy also being a very limited form of government if it was effectively replacing salaried officials, apparatniks, functionaries etc. with the citizenry itself.
Plus there's a bunch of stereotypes thrown in there too, like the left being doves rather than hawks in foreign policy, not if you've studied recent history, in the UK and US the democrats/labour have been involved in as many foreign wars and as much militarism as republicans/conservatives, the same story exists in history, from the time of the French revolution at least.
Sometimes its a weird kind of over compensation, because they are aware of the stereotype and sometimes its a response to the opposite stereotype.
Lenin's state and revolution was totally libertarian and small state in orientation but when he was the architect of one of the greatest red terrors ever because he thought if there hadnt been one there'd have been an even greater white (establishment) terror instead, the sort of big government that grew up after that was largely rationalised the same ways.