NUF Survey Results - Personality & Society

Part 5 of the NUF Survey results. Table of contents at the bottom.

PERSONALITY & SOCIETY
This is going to be a long section where I talk about interesting topics in a boring manner. Basically, the opposite of a TED talk.

HAPPINESS
How happy are NUF users? Using the 0-10 scale, respondents reported an average score of 5.53. While this may be somewhat lower than one might hope for, all things considered, this isn’t so bad. Of course, as concluded by a much better designed and focused survey, generally “people self-report that they’re happier than they may actually be,” so bear that in mind.

There were, of course, a couple of correlations to note other than the correlation with number of close friends mentioned previously. Generally, the happier respondents were the less likely they were to have contemplated suicide/self-harm within the recent past. A shocking conclusion, I know. In all seriousness, what’s notable is that while there was a correlation, it was actually pretty weak, barely being significant enough to raise a flag when I was mining the data. So, uh, being happy only has a minor impact on whether you’ll think about hurting yourself? Depending on how you look at it, that could actually be a pretty dark conclusion.

The next correlation found was that happier people were generally less likely to answer positively to the question “Could you imagine yourself killing someone?” Of course, this data isn’t enough to be able to say if it’s that happier people have a harder time thinking of murdering someone, those who think about killing become less happy, or some other factor influencing both, but it’s a correlation that makes sense if one thinks about society at large. School shooters are rarely described as happy students with lots of friends.

Related to self-reflection, happier people were more likely to be satisfied with their appearance, rated themselves as more creative, and were more likely to rate themselves higher when asked if they agreed that they were a good person. The correlation of satisfaction with appearance was the strongest and the correlation with reported creativity was the weakest. However, they all showed stronger correlations than low happiness and suicidal thoughts. Of course, this isn’t to say that ugly people are unhappy; directly rating appearance is not within the scope of this survey, merely respondents' satisfaction with their appearance. What can be theorized is that appearance was, whether consciously or unconsciously, the most important to determining happiness of the various traits which respondents were asked to assess in the survey. This is a just a theory and not necessarily true; there are other possible interpretations and theories that could be derived from the data.

SELF-HARM & PSYCHIATRY
Moving on...suicide. A little over 40% of respondents reported entertaining thoughts of self-harm or suicide within the past two years. Even adjusting for the younger population of NUF (as young people are generally more likely to have those feelings), this seems inordinately high compared to the world at large. Do people who want to hurt themselves come to NUF or does NUF make you want to hurt yourself? ….Well, correlation doesn’t equal causation so no conclusions can proven, but I find the latter fairly unconvincing. In any case, it seems that NUF is comprised of a fairly high-risk userbase.

It was my first instinct to say that this was because NUF was filled with a bunch of lonely introverts, but as previously established, while friends influenced happiness and happiness influenced thoughts of self-harm, there was no direct correlation to be found between the two. In addition, the survey found no correlation between introversion and suicide. However, there were quite a few other correlations found.

Firstly, sexuality: as I’m sure comes as little surprise given LGBT-awareness efforts, being non-heterosexual carried a slightly increased risk. What came as a surprise to me was that the most at-risk group was actually those respondents who reported being asexual. In fact, being asexual was one of the strongest predictors of having self-harming thoughts out of anything in the survey. One theory I could come up with is that depression (and, ironically, use of certain antidepressants) is linked to thoughts of self-harm and lack of sexual desire. Perhaps there’s some neurological factor that predisposes people to both.

Other correlations included being non-religious with a religious family, evaluating oneself as being less street smart, evaluating oneself as being less humorous, being less satisfied with one’s appearance, and being less likely to report seeing someone shoplifting. Having a religious family can be tough if one is non-religious as it becomes harder to confide in them and get their support, speaking from personal experience and judging based on the negative impact that religious differences had on familial closeness as discussed previously. There was no correlation found between thoughts of self-harm and religiosity, so it’s somewhat unlikely that self-harming thoughts directly cause people to stray away from their faith. The negative self-evaluations could be thought of as broader issues of self-esteem, though it is interesting that it was those traits in particular that showed a correlation. Once again, there wasn’t any clear connection between self-harm and extroversion, occupational attainment, or educational attainment, so while respondents’ street smarts were negatively evaluated, it’s not as though self-harming respondents can be typecast as social outcasts/hikineets. Oddly, humor was also negatively evaluated. The reason I call this odd is because there is a well-documented connection between being humorous and suffering some kind of emotional hardship...though perhaps it’s simply a matter of self-evaluation and, in fact, these respondents are actually quite funny; the matter is unresolved. Appearance...well, satisfaction with one’s appearance seems to be pretty important across the board. As for respondents being less likely to snitch if they see shoplifting, perhaps this population feels less societal responsibility as a result of being let down by society? Even if I try to answer based on my own experience, it’s likely not something that can be universally applied.

In a related vein, about 17% of respondents had visited a mental health professional within the past two years. Compared to the US population, this is below average, but within the expected rate of the uninsured US population. In slightly more optimistic news, while a concern of the medical community has been that going to visit a psychiatrist has been more heavily stigmatized in non-Western communities, there was no relationship found in the survey between region and likelihood of having visited such a professional, so...good job? As expected, respondents with thoughts of self-harm were more likely to have visited a mental health professional than other respondents.

SELF-EVALUATION
Respondents were asked to rate themselves on a 0-10 scale on a number of personal traits, most of which have been mentioned at some point previously. These traits were book smarts, street smarts, extroversion, satisfaction with appearance, humor, creativity, paranoia, and whether or not they considered themselves a “good person”. The self-evaluations all generally averaged about 5.00±0.5 with the exception of the lowest and highest rated traits. While we don’t have any data for the world at large, these results suggest that 5.00 is a fairly good estimation for a baseline average, and thus the two traits that vary from it by a large margin are indicative of a fundamental difference between NUF users and their peers in the wider population.

The trait NUF users rated themselves the lowest on was, unsurprisingly, extroversion, at a mere 3.05. Reasonably, reading novels is the pastime of those who’d rather avoid other people. Honestly, I was hoping for a lot more correlations but the only ones of interest were some weak correlations with satisfaction with appearance and self-evaluation of humor. However, because the population of NUF as a whole rates so low on extroversion, perhaps any statistical anomaly displayed by the respondents could be connected to it; perhaps I should revise my statement in the previous section to say that it’s possible that there is a connection between thoughts of self-harm and extroversion, just that it could not be observed because there were not enough extroverted respondents. In any case, the correlation with appearance/humor evaluation demonstrates a possible connection, and might hint at deeper issues regarding self-esteem/self-worth.

The trait NUF users rated themselves most highly on was book smarts, at 6.23. I suppose we can stereotype ourselves as quiet nerds? Ah, well, humor aside, this also wasn’t an unexpected result. However, the correlations were somewhat weirder than expected. Firstly, people who rated themselves as book smart were more likely to prefer the people in their life to be complex rather than simple; perhaps once I go into more depth about preference for simplicity/complexity in other people, this relationship might be slightly edified. Secondly, while there was no significant difference in rating between those who liked and those who disliked the taste of beer, those who had never tried beer before rated themselves significantly lower. This might conceivably relate to age or region/religion, however, neither of those two showed any significant correlation with the rating. Third, higher book smarts rating was correlated to higher rating of street smarts. Perhaps it was just a sign people were more confident in their abilities overall. Fourth, somewhat unexpectedly, there was a negative correlation with time spent on NU, though maybe it makes sense if you consider NUF a place to go to waste time instead of studying or reading. Fifth, self-evaluations of both humor and creativity were positively correlated with book smarts. This reinforces the theory that respondents just had a better opinion of their abilities overall; looking at this, there notably wasn’t a correlation with evaluation of appearance or goodness, so it seems to just be related to increased confidence in their intellectual capabilities rather than a blanket tendency to evaluate oneself higher. Sixth, people who considered themselves more book smart were more likely to report being unafraid of death. This was actually a fairly significant correlation, but my guess is as good as any as to why this might be the case. Seventh, and lastly, when respondents were asked to talk about their most painful experience, those who rated themselves lower for book smarts were more likely to provide a physically painful experience than an emotionally painful one.

As stated, other than those two traits, all other traits fell within ±0.5 of 5.00. They could thus be assumed, somewhat unscientifically, to not be terribly different to the results of non-NUF users. In order from highest to lowest, self-evaluation of creativity averaged 5.47, appearance averaged 5.12, “goodness” averaged 5.04, paranoia averaged 4.97, humor averaged 4.91, and street smarts averaged 4.51. There are, of course, plenty of correlations and connections associated with each of these traits which I’ve listed out below. With more details, perhaps one could try to group together personality traits like whatever the most popular incarnation of the Myers-Briggs test is these days, but I’m not particularly interested in doing so.

For creativity, from strongest to weakest significance:

• There was a strong relationship between creativity and humor. Perhaps the more creative you are, the easier it is to come up with something you find funny?
• Creative respondents were more likely to provide answers relating to emotional pain than physical pain when asked about their most painful experience.
• As previously stated, creativity and book smarts were correlated.
• As previously mentioned, respondents who rated themselves as more creative also rated themselves as happier. Maybe they’re more creatively lying to themselves….I’m sorry, that was overly bitter of me.
• Middle and youngest siblings showed a marked increase in creativity compared to eldest siblings and especially only children. Spoiled brats….

For satisfaction with appearance, from strongest to weakest significance:

• As stated, respondents were more likely to be satisfied with their appearance if they had better relationships with their sibling(s).
• Religious respondents were more likely to be satisfied with their appearance, and the more serious respondents were about their faith the stronger the correlation. Perhaps it’s the philosophical ramifications of believing your body is a gift from God?
• As stated, happy respondents were more likely to be satisfied with their appearance.
• Less satisfied respondents also tended to rate their level of street smarts as lower.
• As stated, respondents with less satisfaction with their appearance were more likely to have entertained thoughts of self-harm.
• Respondents who spent more time on NU/NUF were generally less satisfied with their appearance.
• As stated, there was a weak correlation between satisfaction with appearance and extroversion.

For how strongly respondents felt they were a “good person”, from strongest to weakest significance:

• Intuitively, respondents who couldn’t imagine themselves killing someone tended to rate themselves higher on goodness.
• Religious respondents were more likely to think that they were good people. Respondents’ seriousness in their faith didn’t show a significant effect, but oddly, respondents who were non-religious with a religious family were less likely to think they were good people to a strong degree of significance. Indeed, in general, rather than religious people rating themselves very far above 5.00, it would be more accurate to say that non-religious people rated themselves far below 5.00, especially those with religious families whose average was closer to 3.95.
• As stated, happier respondents were generally more agreeable to the notion that they were good people.
• The more you feel you’re a good person….the less you exercise? Huh. I suspect this was just a matter of random chance.
• Those respondents who believed they had an obligation to help other people tended to have a better opinion of their own goodness, but this may have been another connection with religion.

For paranoia, from strongest to weakest significance:

• Respondents who preferred to be romantically pursued generally rated themselves as more paranoid than those who preferred both pursuing/being pursued and those who weren’t romantically interested. Perhaps paranoia is part of the “herbivore boy” psyche?
• Respondents who considered themselves translators of some form rated themselves as less paranoid. Now there’s a recruitment slogan!
• Pet-owners rated themselves as slightly less paranoid. Huh, I suppose I don’t need to be paranoid when I know that everything bad that happens to me is my cat’s fault.

For humor, from strongest to weakest significance:

• As stated, respondents who considered themselves more creative generally considered themselves more humorous.
• There was a significant correlation between respondents considering themselves street smart and considering themselves humorous.
• As stated, there was a correlation between respondents considering themselves book smart and considering themselves humorous.
• Uh, the more time respondents spent on NU/NUF, generally, the less humorous they considered themselves. Must be why NUF is such a solemn, no-nonsense kind of place. /s
• As stated, respondents who had considered self-harm generally considered themselves less humorous.
• Respondents who said that they’d report a shoplifter if they saw one generally considered themselves more humorous. Snitches cause stitches in your sides, apparently.
• Religious respondents generally considered themselves slightly more humorous, though perhaps there’s a broader increase in confidence stemming from religion. The seriousness of respondents’ faith and whether they differed in belief from their family had no impact.
• As stated, there was a slight correlation between humor and extroversion.

For street smarts, from strongest to weakest significance:

• As stated, there was a strong correlation between respondents considering themselves street smart and considering themselves humorous.
• As stated, there was some a connection with novel preferences (See Novel Preferences section).
• As stated, respondents who considered themselves more book smart generally considered themselves more street smart as well.
• Respondents who spent more time on NU/NUF generally considered themselves less street smart.
• As stated, there was a correlation between street smarts and satisfaction with appearance.
• Respondents who rated themselves as more street smart were more likely to enjoy horror movies. This is actually a fairly interesting correlation to me because it suggests that people who are more street smart are those who enjoy the adrenaline rush from stressful situations, so perhaps they’re more used to and confident about navigating society generally. Just a theory.
• As stated, respondents who considered themselves more street smart were less likely to have considered self-harm within the recent past.
• Respondents who considered themselves more street smart were less likely to respond that they were afraid of death. This may fit in with the theory I outlined about the correlation with liking horror movies.

SOCIAL VIEWS
I came up with the idea of doing a survey and wrote all the questions in an hour or so one night past midnight while in a manic state induced by what medical professionals might describe as “unanticipated interaction of medication”, so there may have been a slight lack of planning on my part. In retrospect, I probably could have massively expanded this section, but alas, it seems that will have to wait for a future survey. As it stands, the questions here are somewhat eclectic.

First off, as mentioned previously, >96% of respondents believed in climate change. While I had some difficulty finding statistics on the views of the general global population, this figure is higher than that of the general US population. Respondents from SEA, Latin America, and Africa universally answered that it was real, which makes sense when one considers that people living in those regions are likely to be able to observe a far greater level of environmental degradation than is readily apparent in many Western nations. However, seeing as there were so few respondents who answered in the negative, no significantly meaningful profile could be determined.

Moving on, respondents were asked if they felt obligated to help their fellow human beings. Around 45% answered in the positive. When I did a broad test on the data looking for correlations, there appeared to be a modest relationship with the region respondents were from, which made me think that it may have been a cultural difference. However, a closer examination has me fairly convinced that the cultural difference in question is that some regions are more religious than others, because whether the respondent was religious, or more importantly, whether they were from a religious family, seemed to be the most significant correlation with whether they answered yes or not. Perhaps it was the word “obligated”, but in any case, it’d be interesting to see the role that religions have played in promoting altruistic behavior. On a personal note, I do not consider myself a religious person nor do I have a belief in anything that could be construed as spiritual/supernatural, however, it’s my opinion that many that take that stance have an unfairly harsh view of the major world religions purely as sources of division/violence and anti-progressivism while ignoring the often quite positive influences they had historically on social cohesion and social justice which could be interpreted as being illustrated by these results.

On a somewhat related topic, 32% of respondents reported that they would turn in someone if they caught them shoplifting. If the previous question was asking about how much obligation respondents felt towards other individual humans, this question was sort of intended as a metric of how obligated they felt towards society and the law in general. Religion showed a slight correlation, but much weaker than the previous question. Other than those mentioned in previous sections, there were two predictors that I wasn’t expecting. For one, those who were in or looking for a relationship were much more likely to report a shoplifter than respondents who were single and not looking for a relationship. Perhaps dissatisfaction with society precludes people from looking for a significant other? It’s possible, I suppose. I would hesitate to say self-centered, but perhaps this category of respondents would prefer to deal with personal concerns before trying to interact with society... or so I say as one of those respondents. The other predictor was, funnily enough, respondents who spent more time reading were less likely to snitch. Heh, maybe all those protagonists going, “Not my problem,” have gotten to them? Well, it’s more likely that heavy readers tend to be less engaged with society and thus feel less obligation, but that’s speculation.

In term of feminism, a little over 15% of respondents considered themselves feminists, a little over 8% responded that they were anti-feminists, and the remainder responded that they simply were not feminists. Note that “feminist” wasn’t defined, so it was purely up to the respondents to evaluate whether they were one or not. The number of respondents who considered themselves feminist was somewhat lower than the US average even when just considering the male population, but may be generally reflective of views globally. There was a definite gender divide here, but it was in terms of percentage of overall gender populations rather than absolute number of respondents, as users who reported being feminist were split nearly evenly between men and women. This in turn meant that about half of female respondents responded “Not a Feminist”. There were no female anti-feminists. Notably, there was something of a regional divide; the countries that had the most feminist respondents were the US and the Philippines. Respondents from Latin America, Africa, Oceania, and other Asian nations for the most part responded with “Not a Feminist”. Distinctly, most anti-feminist respondents were European, and there were no feminist respondents from Europe, so it seems they have a somewhat harsher view of feminism there than elsewhere. Other than that, funnily enough, the next largest group of anti-feminists were US respondents, an indication of the rather vitriolic societal divides in the US.

Lastly, when asked whether they kept up with world events, respondents were split fairly evenly, with 53% responding “Yes”. Perhaps a related question could have been whether respondents tended towards globalism or isolationism, however, this question is much more straightforward and easy to understand. The strongest predictor was that, perhaps intuitively, respondents who had traveled to another country alone before tended to be more likely to keep tabs on the rest of the world. Otherwise, religious respondents were less likely to keep up with the rest of the world. At the same time, however, respondents who said “Yes” also tended to be closer to their parents and siblings, a trait that (for parents, at least) was also correlated with religiousness.

BONUS ROUND: NUF DATING
This section is just for fun. I mentioned at the beginning that I cribbed a couple of questions off of the OkCupid stats blog, so allow me to now reveal their implications, as observed by the aforementioned dating site. You can even use these questions when looking for dates in the future, or compare answers. Even if NUF Dating is now closed, you can let its soul live on!

Let’s start traditional: Do the two of you have long-term potential? To this end, OkCupid found that there were three questions which 32% of successful couples on their site had agreed on, 3.7x the rate of coincidence. These questions were even better predictors than questions users thought were the most important, like “Is God important in your life?” or “Does smoking disgust you?” The three questions were “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” (28% of NUF users said yes), “Do you like horror movies?” (30% of NUF users said yes), and “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” (28% of NUF users said yes). This is interesting in itself, but let’s also put a NU spin on it. These questions all strongly correlate to three novel-related survey questions: preferred novels, disliked novels, and time spent reading novels, respectively. So if you find someone who likes the same type of novels as you, dislikes the same type of novels as you, and reads about the same amount time per day as you, well, they might just be the one.

Moving on, say you’re just more interested in hooking up and you want to find out whether someone else is likely interested in some shenanigans after a first date. No worries, there’s two survey questions that’ll help you! Firstly, “Do you like the taste of beer?” Those who do are generally about 30% more likely to also consider sleeping with someone on a first date. On the NUF survey, 24% of respondents answered that they did like the taste of beer, 45% answered that they did not, and the rest had never tried beer before (mostly underage or Muslim respondents). Of course, even if the other party has never tried beer before, there’s still the other question. Unfortunately, this question is only a predictor for men and not women. “Could you imagine yourself killing someone?” Men who said yes had an 82% chance of also saying they’d consider sleeping with someone on a first date. As it so happens, 65% of male NUF respondents said they could.

Lastly, say you want to discreetly inquire about your date’s politics without directly touching upon the hot button issues. That's okay, there’s still one question left: “Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?” This was a predictor for the questions “Should burning your country’s flag be illegal?”, “Should the death penalty be abolished?”, “Should gay marriage be legal?”, and “Should Evolution and Creationism be taught side by side in schools?” Answering “simple” was generally connected with skewing conservative on those questions, answering “complex” was generally tied with skewing liberal. In any case, 66% of respondents answered “simple” and the others answered “complex”. Alright, admittedly, I suspect this question is slightly culturally biased, as SEA respondents were overwhelmingly likely to answer “simple” regardless of any other factor.

There were actually two respondents who matched perfectly on all of the questions in this section. Unfortunately, they were both purely heterosexual men. Though, it’s not like heterosexuality has particularly stopped the Danmei admirers from creating a ship before….

EXPERIENCES
These are more qualitative questions than quantitative ones, though I have tried to do some quantification where possible. Basically, respondents were asked for their deepest fear, their most painful experience, and their happiest experience.

What I did manage to quantify was, for the responses for fear and pain, whether the respondent’s answer were deemed to be emotional or physical in nature. For painful experiences, of the responses received, 41% were emotional, 48% were physical, and the remainder had some element of both. For fear, 58% of responses were deemed to be an emotional fear (e.g. abandonment), 27% were physical, and the rest were some mixture of both. Of course, perhaps this could be considered a question of what the most salient pain and fear are; that is, what had the biggest impact on them psychologically, or perhaps what was the most recent. There are some correlations with pain which have mostly been stated in the Self-Evaluation section; for fear, however, oddly enough the only notable predictor is educational attainment, in that those who have attended education beyond high school are more likely to provide an emotional fear than a physical one. I’d be tempted to chalk this up to age, but no correlation was found there. There wasn’t any particular correlation between providing an emotional or physical fear and providing an emotional or physical painful experience, so at least it seems as though NUF users don’t let their past experiences dictate their fears for the future.

Notably, this sort of quantification wasn’t practical for happiest experiences because far fewer respondents provided answers. Even those that did mostly provided some variation of “don’t know/don’t remember”. This pretty neatly demonstrates the psychological principle that happy/positive experiences tend to be far less salient than painful/negative ones, that is, when bad things happen to you, you tend to remember them far better than when good things do. This was perhaps a useful trait for keeping us alive in the savage wilderness of our ancestors, but a somewhat maladaptive phenomenon when it leads to PTSD and anxiety disorders.

Anyway, for fear, the most common physical fear was some kind of water-based phobia like the ocean or drowning, however, physical phobias ranged the gamut from frogs to heights to fire to being tortured without a whole lot of commonalities between respondents. Emotionally, loneliness was the biggest fear for NUF users, followed by the related fear of being abandoned by friends, family, or significant others. This may seem somewhat contradictory given how introverted NUF users reported themselves to be, but I suppose when it’s difficult for you to meet people, you become really scared of losing the loved ones you’ve got.

Related to fear (and because I don’t really have any other section to put them in), respondents were asked whether they feared death, to which 53% said yes and 47% said no. Other than correlations pointed out in the Self-Evaluation section, the strongest predictor was respondents’ answer to whether they preferred people simple or complex, with those who preferred people simple tending to say yes more often than those who preferred people complex. Related to fear of death (and even less related to the section topic), respondents were asked whether they’d accept eternal life if it were offered to them, to which 41% said they would, 23% said they wouldn’t, and 36% said they didn’t know. Other than number of close friends, the only predictor was that respondents who said that they had an obligation to help other people were slightly less likely to answer yes.

For most painful experience, naturally, respondents haven’t lived identical lives so it was even more varied than fear. Physically, broken bones were pretty common, but responses also included snakebite, circumcision, car accidents, getting burning material in their eye, and getting shot. Emotionally, breakups were the main source of pain, with death of loved ones a distant second. There were a couple of respondents whose breakup story involved getting NTR’d, but rather oddly, these were all specifically male Malaysian respondents. Why Malaysia in particular? Is there a really strong adultery fetish there? Is there just one incredibly charming guy? I dunno.

For happiest experience, again, responses were sparse and somewhat scattered. There was one shared answer, though: sex. Y’all are a bunch of horndogs, because about 20% of answers were somehow sexual in nature. In fact, this was even more common than other romantic experiences like dates or getting engaged. Otherwise, there were a couple of responses related to eating, which seems a little underwhelming but is understandable given that happy experiences are hard to remember and thus food is probably one of your few salient positive memories. Graduating was also a shared happiest experience, though not, unfortunately, for the respondent who listed going to college as their most painful experience. Other responses included going to Disneyland, beating up that NTR’er (lol), drinking (welp), playing video games, and getting money. The respondent who found happiness farming in an MMO...just go become a KR novel protagonist already...

PREFERENCES
So....yet another section without much direction. This is also going to be mostly qualitative.

The only quantitative question in this section was whether respondents felt more drawn to the sciences, the humanities, or both equally. While 48% answered both, 39% answered the sciences and only 13% answered with humanities. It seems a little odd to me that the sciences would be favored over the humanities given that this is a site for reading novels, but I suppose I can’t be particularly nonplussed given I’ve just written a little over 12,000 words on statistics and other analyses for no particular reason. There were some slight regional tendencies which might indicate cultural differences. Respondents from Europe mostly tended to the sciences, as did North Americans to a lesser extent, so perhaps the efforts to promote STEM subjects in the last few decades has borne fruit. Respondents from SEA and South Asia generally answered that they were equally drawn to both sciences and humanities, so I suppose they liked being well-rounded in that regard. South American respondents were mostly drawn to the humanities. Respondents from other regions were fairly evenly distributed.

Respondents were asked about their ideal job. Naturally, the majority of answers were something along the lines of “make a lot of money without having to do too much work”, but otherwise there were a couple of categories that popped up. The most common category was those respondents who wanted a writing profession, mostly author, which, of course, makes abundant sense given the nature of NU. Closely following was video game developer and other gaming jobs, from tester to GameStop employee, which I suppose also fits the slightly nerdy undertone of this site. Relatedly, there were a couple of respondents seeking computer science jobs like programmer, which, uh, sounds pretty achievable, actually. Follow your dreams, kids. Then, there was an oddly specific phenomenon of Australians wanting to be government officials. Asking my friends down under, it seems that Australian government jobs are seen as having ultimate job security and good pay for doing inane work. Fair enough. Finally, there were a few respondents who wanted to be teachers. Having given presentations to middle schoolers, all I can say is, good luck. Other individual answers included (but weren’t limited to) police officer, pharmaceutical researcher, doctor, stockbroker, and military pilot.

Respondents were asked about their favorite movies, TV shows, and genres of music. For movies and TV shows, pretty much everyone gave different answers. For movies, there were two respondents who answered Koe no Katachi, and for TV shows a couple of respondents liked How I Met Your Mother, but other than that there were no commonalities. Notably, most respondents liked Western shows and movies, with anime a far distant second, but there were only one or two respondents who provided answers that didn’t fall in those categories. Another respondent provided the answer that “[their] country’s TV shows are utter shit”, so perhaps it’s simply that the entertainment industries of other regions are still struggling to catch up in terms of quality. Musically, NUF users seem to gravitate towards rock. The various “Japanese media” genres such as anime openings, vocaloid, and touhou remixes also formed a fairly formidable section, but there wasn’t much unity in regards to “genre” there. Other shared musical tastes, in descending order of popularity, were metal, pop, lo-fi, rap, and jazz. Those stragglers liking classical, blues, and ska...well, I’m sure your soulmates exist somewhere out there.

Lastly, the most important question of the survey, what were respondents’ favorite fruit? This actually ended up as a tie between apples and mangos; each were preferred by about 15% of respondents. The runner up was the humble banana, often accompanied by a few euphemistic references. In third place were oranges. Oddly, oranges were one of the only fruit to show a distinct regional preference, with most African respondents choosing oranges. Are African oranges extra delicious? Are oranges a luxury product there? Grapes and strawberries had a good showing with about 7% of the respondents each, followed by pineapples and watermelons. Other than those, a couple of respondents chose things like kiwi, jackfruit, dragonfruit, passionfruit, and honeydew melon. In the answers were also a feijoa and a rock melon, neither of which I had ever heard of before. There was even someone who liked durian. It’s fine, just don’t bring it in my car.

It seems like the full results were too long to be included in a single blog post, so here's a handy table of contents to which I'll be adding links once I make the posts.

• Introduction
• Demographics
  • Location & Language
  • Age
  • Gender, Sexuality, & Romance
  • Education & Employment
  • Religion

• Meta-Survey
  • Useless Questions
  • Bad Faith
  • Declining to Answer

• Lifestyle
  • Novel Preferences
  • Recreation & Exercise
  • Family
  • Friends & Pets
  • (Yet Another) NU Section

• Personality & Society (You are here)
  • Happiness
  • Self-Harm & Psychiatry
  • Self-Evaluation
  • Social Views
  • Bonus Round: NUF Dating
  • Experiences
  • Preferences

• Survey Reflection