Online attachment quizzes are very popular and convenient ways of assessing one’s attachment style. In about 10 minutes, you can answer a few dozen questions about your relationship beliefs, and get back an immediate result.
Most people seem satisfied, or even enlightened, by the results – some even using the quiz to reassess their attachment style progress every so often.
But others have had results that have left them scratching their heads – the clearly dismissive partner who (to your dismay) scored secure, or confusing test results that were evenly distributed between styles.
Issues with Result Interpretation
If you’ve taken a quiz that gave you a percentage/point breakdown – or even better, a pie chart – you have an opportunity to reinterpret your results yourself. Here are two major considerations:
Not All Styles are Made Equal
You may have been deemed “secure” by the quiz, but are you? We suspect that many online quizzes are programmed to determine your attachment style by simply tallying your highest score. In other words, if you score 40% secure, and 30% each on the other styles (a total of 100%), then the system will spit out a secure result.
But there’s a problem with this. The “other styles” are all insecure styles, which means you’d be 60% insecure. Given that attachment security is defined by resilience and felt safety, does that sound fair to you? Would you live in a house that was only 40% secure?
Conclusion: it’s important to consider your secure score in relation to your insecure score.
Blurred Boundaries
The other major interpretive consideration has to do with the concept of fearful-avoidant style.
What happens when you have a good chunk of fearful-avoidant style in your results? Or an even mix of anxious and avoidant? Are you really just fearful-avoidant, but with some separation (like when you leave your smoothie sitting out too long)?
We don’t know the answer to that question, but we tend to think this could be fearful-avoidant style, with some separation into anxious and dismissing.
Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
With the simple interpretive things out of the way, let’s dive into a summary of why the entire online attachment quiz concept is flawed from the beginning.
Self-Report Assessments
Self-report tests are notoriously unreliable. Studies have shown that most people believe they are better than average in desirable traits like intelligence.
Online attachment quizzes overlook a major problem: subconscious defense mechanisms, or what Bowlby called “defensive exclusion” – a type of information processing that neutralizes, dismisses or confuses attachment-related information.
If you want accurate, reliable assessments of your attachment, it’s important to use an observer-report assessment like the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and/or the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP).
The Social Psychology Model vs Developmental Attachment Theory
The biggest problem is the one that virtually no one knows about – attachment “styles” are based on a social psychology model invented in 1987 by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver – a model that is not completely congruent with the Bowlby/Ainsworth model of developmental attachment theory.
To summarize here, the social psychology model is based on conscious self-report tests (namely the ECR, RSQ or ASQ) on which online attachment quizzes are based. It is essentially a personality model of attachment, in which attachment is stripped down to simple, dimensional scales (anxiety on one end, avoidance on the other).
The social personality model of attachment theory also fails to distinguish between the attachment system (a neurobiological behavioral system that must be engaged in order to be measured) and adjacent systems such as the affiliative (friend) system, the sexual (romantic) system. Tell me more.
Conclusion
While online attachment quizzes may be a useful tool to give us a rough sketch of our conscious beliefs about attachment, there are practical issues with the interpretation of some online results.
Although undeniably quick and convenient, online attachment quizzes are based on an oversimplified and 2-dimensional social psychology viewpoint that is inferior to more complex and orthodox developmental attachment theory assessments.
Imagine admiring a beautiful sculpture in an art museum, and the only way you could express all of the feelings and thoughts it evoked was through a generic 36-question art quiz where all of the answers were 1 through 5.
Would that be fair?