Standards Test

Most people assume that having high standards is an all-or-nothing trait, but psychological research suggests expectations are far more selective. You might insist on flawless results in your professional projects while remaining entirely relaxed about household chores, or maintain strict criteria for dating while welcoming all kinds of friends. This test explores how you set your expectations across distinct spheres of daily life. In their research on domains of perfectionism, Joachim Stoeber and Franziska S. Stoeber found that people rarely set exceptionally high bars across every area of living. Instead, most individuals concentrate demanding expectations in a few chosen domains while remaining flexible in others.

This assessment maps your expectations across six core facets. Dating Standards reflect what you look for in a romantic partner and relationship, drawing on Garth Fletcher and colleagues' framework of partner ideals regarding warmth, attractiveness, and status, and whether you hold out for an ideal match. Friend Standards, grounded in Jeffrey Hall's research on friendship expectations, capture what you expect from companions regarding loyalty, effort, shared outlooks, and dependability. Work Standards focus on your quality threshold for professional or academic tasks, tracking your inclination to check details, refine acceptable work, and refuse to submit output that falls short of your personal best.

The remaining facets evaluate personal habits, living spaces, and everyday choices. Self Standards address the expectations you hold for yourself as an individual, including grooming, hygiene, dress, speech, and keeping your word. Home Standards examine your tolerance for disorder, measuring how clean and orderly your living space must be before you can relax. Taste Standards look at your consumer and lifestyle decisions, drawing on the high-standards facet of Gergana Nenkov and colleagues' work on maximizing. This domain captures how picky you are about what you buy, eat, and watch, and whether you insist on finding the best rather than settling for good enough.

These areas follow patterns in published research. In Stoeber and Stoeber's samples of university students and Internet users, work was the area where the most people were perfectionistic, followed by studies, bodily hygiene, spelling and the presentation of documents, and the average person was perfectionistic in five or six of the twenty-two areas listed. Fletcher and colleagues found that ideals of a partner's warmth, attractiveness and status act as a standard: the closer a current partner came to them, the more positively people rated the relationship. Hall showed that expectations such as reciprocity and help form a standard against which friendships are judged. Finally, Nenkov and colleagues found that high standards when making choices go with perfectionism, regret and a liking for effortful thinking, but not strongly with lower happiness or with depression.

The average your result is compared with in the result sentence is an estimate made for this test, not a measured norm. The estimates follow the order of the areas in Stoeber and Stoeber's study, where work ranked highest and purchases lowest, set a little above the middle of the scale. They are not standardized percentiles, so treat the comparison as a rough guide to where your standards are most demanding and where they are most relaxed.

This test is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. Having high standards is neither good nor bad, and having relaxed expectations is not a failing. The results do not constitute a clinical assessment or psychological diagnosis, and the original items are not validated diagnostic subscales. Instead, your profile offers a clear snapshot of how you distribute your expectations, giving you insight into where you hold the line and where you feel comfortable letting things slide.

References

• Stoeber, J. & Stoeber, F. S. (2009). Domains of perfectionism: Prevalence and relationships with perfectionism, gender, age, and satisfaction with life. Personality and Individual Differences, 46(4), 530-535.
• Fletcher, G. J. O., Simpson, J. A., Thomas, G., & Giles, L. (1999). Ideals in intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(1), 72-89.
• Hall, J. A. (2012). Friendship standards: The dimensions of ideal expectations. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29(7), 884-907.
• Nenkov, G. Y., Morrin, M., Ward, A., Schwartz, B., & Hulland, J. (2008). A short form of the Maximization Scale: Factor structure, reliability and validity studies. Judgment and Decision Making, 3(5), 371-388.

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