You're Weirder Than You Think
One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here's a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).
I did shockingly little of the work on this, so compliments should largely go to Claude, but if you have complaints or think this is wrong please do let me know. If you're interested in the process you can see the conversation here.
You probably don't look much like the average American.
Seven questions. Each one cuts the country into pieces — and as you answer, you'll watch the dots that look like you fade out in real time.
The percentages aren't multiplied marginals. Every dot's behavior comes from real respondents in the General Social Survey, so the correlations between your answers are built in.
Methodology & sources
Data comes from the General Social Survey (GSS) cumulative file, 1972–2024, Release 3. We use respondents from the four most recent waves (2018, 2021, 2022, 2024), restricted to those who answered all seven questions — 4,326 people, weighted by wtssps (NORC's recommended post-stratified weight). Three of the seven questions (about God, gun ownership, and views on same-sex relations) are asked of only a sub-sample of GSS respondents in each wave, which is why the complete-case sample is smaller than the full recent wave count.
The widget stores a 128-cell joint distribution (one cell for every combination of yes/no answers). After each answer, it sums the cells consistent with your answers so far — giving the true conditional probability that a random American still matches you, with all correlations between answers preserved. After all 7 answers, the sum collapses to a single cell.
Some rare combinations have very few observations, so percentages below ~0.1% are noisy. One cell with no observations is given a 0.05% floor.