The Robin Hood Morality Test
talisman.org
talisman.org
0. We're instructed to forget what we know about these characters, but then through hints we're supposed to recover the details of these characters' relationships to each other and the world?
1. Is this a real sheriff?
2. Did Robin Hood and Little John do anything deserving of being locked up?
3. What was the previous relationship between Maid Marion and Robin Hood? Were they truly lovers or something less?
4. What was the previous relationship between Maid Marion and the sheriff? Were they necessarily citizens with a power differential?
5. Would the sheriff have released his prisoners the next morning regardless of Maid Marion's actions?
6. Was Robin's "abuse" verbal or physical in nature?
7. What was the previous relationship between Little John and Maid Marion? Were they necessarily unlinked except via a mutual tie to Robin Hood?
8. What was the previous relationship between Little John and Robin Hood? Were they friends with some obligation to each other, or merely cellmates?
9. Was Little John truthful in his promise of devotion?
Many different rankings can stem from differing understanding of those facts rather than differing moral standards. Not to mention the conflation of Honesty with Morality.
Honestly, I think that's the point. You're told to forget your predispositions and be objective, and it's the degree to which you're able to and the biases that surface to fill the gaps of unknowns that this test is revealing.
The hostile tone is part of the game which, in a sense is trying to be well balanced, and it may help to avoid your brain filtering the message.
Another important missing fact: Was the Sherrif's offer time-limited? It makes a difference regarding whether or not he was coercing Maid Marion, whether she had an opportunity to discuss the proposition with Robin, and thus whether Robin is right in considering her actions a betrayal.
The sheriff's sin is that he can be bribed. He's corrupt.
Marion's sin is that she's willing to bribe to save those she loves.
Robin's sin is that he's jealous and possessive of those around him and doesn't appreciate the sacrifices they made for him.
I can't really see any fault in John. The only way I think you can see any fault in him is if you see Robin's jealousy and possessiveness as justified.
Note that I don't see it that way, but I know enough traditionally-minded men that I can see how one could view John. They would have preferred that John and guys like him be "men" about it and challenged Robin up front, as soon as he fell in love with her. Of course, that diminishes Robin's ability to choose who she wants to be with, and that's kind of the point. The quiz asks us to use both morality and honesty as our guides, so as to capture the varied ways we apply those terms.
It's a mark of how much our society has evolved that many of us lost touch with this sort of traditional paternalism.
I'm quite the minority. My thoughts were as follows:
1. Maid Marion did something she didn't want in order to rescue a lover, and deservedly went with someone in the end. Understandable particularly after being the victim of unappreciation and abuse.
2. The sheriff imprisoned them for reasons that are not explained by the story. Can't fault him here. He allows himself to be bribed with sex which could be seen as a mercy in a certain light. More importantly, he was good on his word to release Robin and Little John, as opposed to abusing his power even further. Basically, he could have done far worse than he did.
3. Little John had the least to lose in all this, and as far as I can tell, hasn't done anything necessarily correct either. It's very easy to start off fulfilling the white knight role, but then have nothing to follow it up with. Neutral on his behavior and he ranks lower than the sheriff only because he had an easier decision to make.
4. Robin is the real cunt in this story from my perspective. Ingratitude coupled with abuse, and lack of empathy as to Marion's motivations.
The claims:
> Such an emphatic rejection of ready-made values is probably partly camouflage. You hate to be thought weak or insecure. You value honesty, and abhor hypocrisy.
> Men: Women are very much part of you life, and you are - or perhaps would like to be - quite ruthless, both with women and life in general.
... interesting.
*edit:formatting
Final edit:
I guess the underpinning difference between my perception of morality is that it's a bit relative based on the search space of decisions available. There are a ton of details omitted that would likely sway my decision a different way, however, so the solution set to this problem seems a bit unstable.
RH's actions, on the other hand, while certainly misguided, are at least understandable, if he lives in a typical culture of masculinity, monogamy, and Victorian-era purity, where it's embarrassing to be rescued by a woman and shameful for women to have sex. He was probably feeling emasculated after being rescued by in such a fashion, and took out his anger on MM. (Which is bad, of course, but I don't think it's worse than what the sheriff did).
Finally, RH's "abuse" is left ambiguous, as opposed to the sheriff's which is very much explicit.
My read was that he extorted sex, not agreed to a bribe. Had Maid Marion offered sex in exchange for Robin's freedom things might be different, but abusing a position of power to get sex is super-shady.
> Maid Marion begged the Sheriff for their release, pleading her love for Robin. The Sheriff agreed to release them only if Maid Marion spent the night with him.
And somehow many of them end up with the impression that MM offered sex.
edit: I wasn't really replying to this post in particular, it just seemed like a good place to go about it. If you check the response for women for your ordering, by the way, the response is fairly positive.
Honestly, like I said, the problem space is unstable because there are too many details omitted. I could come up with a different backdrop of circumstances that could sway the scale any way I want.
My own ranking was MM, LJ, RH, S. Did anyone choose something different from that? Or seriously choose anything different than one of the four permutations above?
We're supposed to leave all our preconceived notions behind, which means that Robin Hood & crew could be random people subject to the whims of an arbitrary and despotic sheriff. If thats the case, it's a much more difficult situation to judge.
For the record I chose the same as you.
I think the harder to judge possibility is if RH and crew were locked up rightfully for committing some sort of crime.
However, then I showed it to a bunch of people, and they started getting all sorts of crazy super-critical results. We started working through them, and I realized that in its simplicity the test was nevertheless tapping on some fairly outrageous opinions about the tolerability of power abuse, and the purity of women. And it stuck with me.
I think the only way to get a good result outside of the range you describe is to describe yourself as a woman, where it gives a positive spin to M>S>J>R (which I came around to as well).
If he's still irreconcilably pissed a few days later, well sure, screw him. But that he acts out initially - not great, but not that surprising. Shouldn't John be trying to help his friend save his relationship, rather than suddenly running off with Marion as soon as there's an opportunity?
Marion is unambiguously blameless (although running off with John without giving Robin a chance to clear his head seems flighty), and the Sheriff completely irredeemable - by any reasonable standard he coerced Marion in to having sex, and then derelicted his duty by releasing two people he'd imprisoned based on a bribe.
You're given the opportunity to read through the mini personality assessments for all answers - whoever wrote them has some severe projections and prejudices.
There seems to be quite a bit more diversity here than that.
But, I wondered about this too. In fact my answers were pretty much opposites, depending on which I prioritised. In the end I left the decision up to my gut, and I'm kind of glad I did, because the results had some nice things to say... about my gut, at least. Not sure where that leaves the rest of me.
(I found the author's willingness not to pull punches in their assessments admirable, in that he/she avoided any MBTI-/horoscope-style wooliness - but some of the results came across a little overly scathing. If there isn't actually one right answer, there are certainly sections of the result space they're clearly convinced are incorrect. But if its inventor is truly a marriage expert, I've no doubt they have their reasons.)
> Men: Perhaps you tend to idealize women and credit them with virtues they don't possess.
Swap Maid Marion and Robin Hood:
> Men: You are sexually inhibited with an underlying distrust of women.
This is crap. It seems putting Maid Marion in the top half means you credit women too much, and putting her in the bottom half means you discredit her too much.
I was actually very pleasantly surprised in that, unlike most "personality tests", there were negative insinuations about some of the orderings. Most of these tests pander to you and tell you what you want to hear, this one out and plainly said "you have some thinking to do..."
I did Maid Marion, Little John, The sheriff, Robin hood and the answer was about spot on.
If I switched LJ and MM it was okay. Although I tend to think of myself as adventurous.
I can't even conceive of putting MM after RH though. Assuming no preconceived notions he just acted like a total jerk.
But then if we assume that RH behavior seems entirely out of character.
I just don't understand
One point of view not many share, but I do at some level, is that none of these people are guilty of anything more than being who they are, which they had no control over. In those terms, they're all morally equal and deserve unconditional compassion.
Your proposed swap is really weird, placing Little John above Robin Hood but Robin Hood above Maid Marion. It indicates that you accepted that Little John is the real mensch in this situation, yet identify with Robin Hood's caddish behavior anyway.
The real decision here is whether Robin Hood is more honorable than the Sheriff. Ultimately the Sheriff was more honest to his baser desires, whereas Robin became irrationally controlling when confronted with a difficult situation.
If you thought Little John should have gotten the prize, then to be consistent, you have to put Robin in the loser's spot. Robin Hood chose wrongly when confronted with a moral dilemma in a way that traumatized the very person responsible for his freedom.
Giving Robin more credit than he deserves indicates that you identify with the feelings he had. They're the feelings of sexual inadequacy and possessiveness.
This is exactly the kind of information which you can't glean from rankings.
The quiz sets up a highly emotionally charged situation that a lot of people are going to make snap judgments about. The first couple of ranking decisions made are going to reflect those snap judgments. The neat thing about the ranking process is that it forces you to think beyond the snap judgments and consider the relative morality of all the characters. It asks you to do this while your guard is down, i.e. if they just asked you the relevant questions about your moral leanings, you wouldn't necessarily give the ones you are really operating on subconsciously.
The other neat thing is the ambiguity of the situation given. You don't know the character's histories, you don't know why the sheriff locked them up, the whole thing is set up so you read those details into the situation. What you read into it will certainly affect your rankings. For example, an unassuming reader won't snap to the judgment that the sheriff forced Maid Marion to have sex with her.
I did that with my girlfriend - both of us could make up our minds for the original tests, but when the genders were reversed, it took a long time for both of us to make sense of the situation and come up with the final ranking.
Very interesting to see how our brains are conditioned.
From this perspective, J did nothing wrong, and helped solve M's problems. M had good intentions, but hurt R, but had little choice. S forced himself on someone against their will as a form of ransom. R lost both his friend and lover as a result of his actions.
The ranking of S and R comes down to whether you think that S forcing himself on M was intended to hurt R, and if he knew what R would do to M as a result.
I wonder if this had been changed from imprisonment to death for R (and possibly J, possibly not) if R's reaction would have changed, or if not, if it would change the S/R ranking.
For reference, I was JMSR.
Considering S's actions - arresting someone and then giving someone the choice between prostituting herself to him or leaving her loved one in prison - I have no reason to assume any justice has been undermined.
The name might indicate a position of legitimate power, but the actions suggest he's nothing more than a kidnapper. Hell, who knows what he might have done to the prisoners had she refused.
It's a 'morality' test. You should ask "which morality"?
If we agreed on the code of conduct (procedure) to use, we could agree on a score for each.
Notice that two persons with the same ranking could have come from different scores (i.e. person A: (25,13,7,1=JRMS) vs Ranking from person B: (-1,-7,-10,-40=JRMS)). And this is just in the one-dimensional morality score system.
The test is mapping an infinite set of scores to a set of 24 choices, and then using those choices to criticize the chooser.
There are a bunch of cases where these two differ (for me), just think of the Snowden and Silkroad cases, or attitudes towards marriage or promiscuity, or towards religion.
"We would expect you to be a happy, well-balanced person who likes people and is liked by others. You question whether many conventional views on morality are valid under all circumstances."
The Sheriff, Robin Hood, Maid Mario, Little John (Female):
"Women: If you really believe this is the right order, you baffle us completely."
Marion bribed the sheriff. The sheriff got bribed. Robin is an asshole. John an opportunist.
Every time, the person who is on the last place seem to be undeserving of it.
To the point of your comment though, I don't understand why anyone would think that applying scientific principles to humans and human interaction is any less valid a use of our time than any other application of the same methods.