Glassbooth: How it works
A lot of people have been coming back with questions on how Glassbooth works. Why they are being paired with the candidates they are and how. Like we say…we are not Google, we want you to know exactly how you derived your results. Here is a look under the hood at the logic that drives this application and how it all works. Have a look, and feel free to go back and experiment with the points you give to each issue and see how this works for yourself.
Put simply, Glassbooth is a proximity test; we see how you feel about the issues you care about and show you which candidate is closest to your beliefs and why.
FIRST, you tell the system which issues are important to you. This informs which questions will be delivered on the second screen as well as how much they influence your total proximity to the candidates. More points to an issue = more questions on that issue and more influence for questions about that issue on your score.
SECOND you take the quiz. Each answer has a numerical value, from 1-5. 1 = strongly oppose, 5 = strongly support.
We have already scored every candidate on every question on the same 1-5 scale. All of the information we used to weigh the candidates is available on the results screen, including sources.
THIRD, your score is compared to the candidates’ scores, and we determine your proximity. Negative or positive differences are scored the same way (if you are neutral, a candidate who is strongly supports or strongly opposes is the same distance from your stance on either side). If you are completely aligned, you are 100% on the question - completely on opposite sides of the spectrum, 0%, and if you are only one space away, you are 75% on the question.
Your proximity is then run, question by question for each issue, to find your average proximity by issue. This is the percentage you will see on the results page for your proximities that are broken down by issue, not your overall score at the top or in the issue summary.
Now the weighting you did on the first screen comes back into play. However many points you allocated to the issue in question is converted to a percentage of total weight. Remember you had 20 points to allocate. 20 Points on one issue = 100% influence of your total proximity score. 10 points = 10/20 = 50% influence. We multiply this influence score by your issue proximity percentage (from the paragraph above), for each issue, and add them up for your overall candidate score.
(click the image above to see how the scoring works)
For this reason, there are certain instances where you could be “very similar” on all issues except one with Candidate A, and “very different” on all issues except one with Candidate B, and still have an overall score that is higher for Candidate B.
Give the quiz another try. Experiment. Explore. Rethink what issues really matter to you when considering your president. Let us know what you find.
Thanks for the expl. I kept getting Dodd and honestly thought this thing had to either be wrong or rigged. Apparently I do share a lot of his views… Who knew? Never woulda believed it if I didnt have all this backup to prove my doubts to be undeserved… logic looks pretty simple tho… but I guess simple is good. It works. Good job.
will
This site is one of the best ideas on the web!!!
I took the quiz and was reading about Dennis Kucinich. When I hit my BACK button to read more I found that the page had expired. So I couldn’t finish reading about Kucinich, someone I’m not even familiar with….
any analysis will have to be qualified as “Firefox users” have been “excluded” because the instructions are not readable with that browser. Does it work with Opera? This is no way to run an airline.
Good job on this concept. One suggestion for improvement I have is that the user should be given the ability to weight the individual questions within each issue. Even though a particular issue may be important to me, some questions may be more important within that issue than others - this will give a better gage of the similarity of views with the candidate.
[...] quiz again after setting different priorities. If you’re interested in how the site works, the Glassbooth blog has detailed descriptions of everything that’s going on under the hood, and the site uses all [...]
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