Human psychology and behavioral studies overlook 85 percent of people
&gt; [...] something like “I generally trust people.” Then participants are asked to choose one point along a five- or seven-point line ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. This numbered line is named a “Likert item” [...]<p>Oh god, having filled out a bunch of these for diagnosis and such I hate these with a passion.  I always wondered how well these actually work.<p>I&#x27;ve seen grammatical nonsense like, &quot;Do you often do X? -- always, often, sometimes, rarely, never&quot;.  What, I often rarely do X?  And what does often mean, anyway?  Like once a week?  Every day?<p>Then, there are the abstract or vague questions that you then have to interpret what concrete situation it could apply to.  Hard to think up an example off the top of my head, but how people reply to these surely depends on what exactly they think it might mean.<p>Then you start losing patience after about 3 minutes of this shit, not to mention 15 or 30 minutes, and just go through them barely reading the questions, but for the first couple of questions you were pondering whether you &quot;agree&quot; or &quot;somewhat agree&quot; for ages.