Greed Test: Stinginess, Thrift and Generosity

Frugality is about the resources you spend on yourself: repairing instead of replacing, planning purchases, seeking value. Stinginess is about other people: not returning a favor, letting somebody else cover you, keeping the useful part of an answer to yourself. Research treats them as separate constructs, and this test scores them on separate axes — a high frugality score never raises your index.

The Social Value Orientation Slider Measure (Murphy, Ackermann and Handgraaf, 2011) is six choices between payoffs for you and for an unknown other person. It produces an angle in degrees which classifies you as competitive, individualistic, prosocial or altruistic against published boundaries, with test-retest reliability of r = .915. It is here because it shows something the statements cannot: how you weigh the payoff of a person you know nothing about. It is reported on its own and does not enter the index.

You can. It is a self-description, and no scoring trick turns it into a lie detector — even the allocation tasks are hypothetical. What the test does check is attention: long strings of identical answers, an infrequency item and a run faster than reading. Beyond that, the profile describes you exactly as honestly as you answered.

You do not have to, and it does not count toward the verdict. Splitting a windfall with an anonymous stranger is a standard task in behavioral economics, and keeping all of it is the single most common choice (Engel, 2011): the task deliberately says nothing about need, a request or a relationship. When the recipient is known to deserve help, only half as many people keep everything. The task shows how you weigh the payoff of someone you know nothing about; the stinginess index is built only from the statements about your own circle.

No. Every money item asks about your behavior relative to what you have — offering before being asked, returning a treat, paying above the minimum you could get away with — not about amounts. The allocation tasks are hypothetical shares of the same sum for everyone.

The full version is 45 screens, roughly 8 minutes. The short version is 22 screens and about 4 minutes, with fewer items per axis, so the result page marks it as a rougher read. Answers are saved on this device, so you can stop and come back.

No. It is a self-knowledge instrument built on published scales, not a clinical assessment, and the bands are our display convention rather than population norms. Nothing here should be used to judge anybody but yourself.

Once the amount is public and once it is private. Image motivation — being generous mainly when it is visible — is a documented effect (Ariely, Bracha and Meier, 2009), and the difference between your two numbers measures it directly instead of asking you to admit to it. The public version is asked first, which if anything makes the measured gap smaller than it really is.

The numbers, not the answers. A share link carries the scores for each axis and nothing else — the person opening it sees where you came out and cannot reconstruct what you said to any individual item, which is the point of sending it at all. Everything else stays in this browser: the answers and the history of previous runs are in local storage, and "Start over" and "Clear history" remove them. Two practical notes: the link keeps working after you clear your history, because the numbers are inside the address itself; and anyone you forward it to sees the same thing, so treat it as public once it leaves you.