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Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and fun book
Review: A fascinating trip into the world of psychology and relationships, "How Do You Compare" is a joy to read. The text examines several areas where we tend to compare ourselves with others. Some of the areas include intelligence quotient, creativity, healthy relationships, ability as a lover, and even if how happy we are. Included are several short tests to help you understand where you stand in each of the areas followed by an analysis of how you then compare to others in the general population. Each section also contains the results of various research projects. These projects answer questions like whether there is a relationship between tall stature and intelligence? What about a relationship between racism and intelligence, or wearing glasses and intelligence? Can music help you fall in love? "How Do You Compare" is a highly recommended an interesting read.
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Summary: Refreshing, Candid Look at What Makes us Tick.
Review: A good friend of mine convinced me to buy this book. "You'll love it" she said. "You will discover funky things about you and me" she said. So I bought a copy and immediately hated the cover ~ but after reading the first two pages I was hooked!
"Compare" takes six major elements of personality - IQ, Creativity, Romance, Sex, Happiness, Work Ethic - and gives us a fresh perspective on each. You learn interesting tidbits about each topic, then get to take scientific, yet fun, quizzes on each. Then the amusement really begins, you compare your scores, thoughts, and feelings to all the other people who have taken these tests at universities around the world. You truly get to learn about yourself then see `how you compare' to everyone else.
This is not your typical self-improvement book. In fact, I'd really call it a book on understanding others. Hint: It is more fun to take these tests and read the thoughtful commentary with friends. You can really learn about what pushes their buttons and what makes them tick.
So, once you get past the awful cover photo, you will be delighted with this book.
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Summary: Toward a brighter world
Review: For me, this book started off on dangerous ground but handled it well. You see, I'm in Mensa (the High IQ Society) and there are some problems with how we are often portrayed in movies or written about in books and periodicals.And so I'm a little edgy when someone starts talking about intelligence. When Chapter One started talking about Mensa and I saw the subhead, "Are Mensa Members Narcissistic?," I thought, "Here we go again. More negative stereotyping." But, it wasn't that at all. It was actually <gasp> a solid piece of writing that left the reader accurately informed. This whole book is like that. Williams is a researcher, and everything in the book is backed by something other than the opinionated blather that seems to dominate publications today. And that something consists of--well, you can read the book to see what I mean. Not to dwell on Chapter One, but I have quite a bit of interest in this subject and if I tell you about how well Williams handled Chapter One you will get a feel for the overall quality of the book. Inside Mensa, we geniuses debate all the time about what intelligence is and what genius is. The standard intelligence tests basically address only 7 areas of intelligence--primarily those involve in information processing and reasoning ability. This is a bit myopic. Why is this myopic? For example, consider an elite athlete.
I'm very much into climbing. After you reach a certain level of conditioning (the hardware), everything else is mental (the software). So, as you climb you become more "intelligent" at climbing. Michael Jordon was perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. This was not due to his physique, good as it was. Ditto for Muhammed Ali, Dan Gable, Bruce Lee, and many other stars of the athletic world. If this example of the athlete is not enough for you, consider people who amaze us with their creativity or other talents despite not being known for their math or reading skills:
* Painters: Rembrandt, for example.
* Actors and actresses: Meryll Streep and Cher have given riveting performances that few others could ever achieve.
* Race car drivers: Try one of those race care simulators, and you'll see this job requires some elite brainpower rather than ordinary intelligence.
* Salespeople: Why are some so successful and others not? It's literally all in their heads!
* Craftspeople: Journeyman electricians, stone masons, sheet metal fabricators, tool and die makers, and machinists are geniuses in their trades. It takes years to become proficient--that is, to develop the intelligence to do these jobs correctly. The list goes on and on. The point is there are many areas of intelligence our standard tests don't even look at. Just because you don't get a score of X on some standard test doesn't mean you aren't very, very smart. Williams brings this point out and helps readers to really see where they are smart and perhaps why.
Williams takes this same approach in subsequent chapters, addressing such things as how creative you are, how healthy your relationships are, how good a lover you are, and how happy you are. He even has a section that helps you discover where your locus of control is and what that means. The book contains 12 simple tests. After each test is an explanation that helps you interpret your score. Williams also provides very useful information on how you might address some needed areas of improvement. How Do You Compare is a good tool for personal assessment. It can help anyone to squelch the negative messages of insufficiency we constantly are bombarded with. And, it can help other people to overcome overestimates of their abilities. But, I think it will primarily help people to take stock of themselves and feel pretty darn good. You can use this book to keep yourself mentally and emotionally on track. Perhaps if enough people did, we'd all live in a much brighter world.
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Summary: How does this book compare? Amazingly well!
Review: I have just finished "How Do You Compare? 12 Simple Tests..." and I found it to be informative, enlightening, and entertaining -- a book doesn't get much better than that! Each of the sections provided such interesting information -- both anectdotal and analytical -- that I found it hard to put the book down. And the tests! The great thing about the tests was that, with any degree of self-honesty, a reader could not help but get a very clear picture of their own personality. Everything was explained clearly. The text was easy to read. All in all, one of the best books I have read in the genre. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: How do you compare?
Review: I have just finished "How Do You Compare? 12 Simple Tests..." and I found it to be informative, enlightening, and entertaining -- a book doesn't get much better than that! Each of the sections provided such interesting information -- both anectdotal and analytical -- that I found it hard to put the book down. And the tests! The great thing about the tests was that, with any degree of self-honesty, a reader could not help but get a very clear picture of their own personality. Everything was explained clearly. The text was easy to read. All in all, one of the best books I have read in the genre. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Informative, entertaining, and eye opening
Review: Like many, I've often taken those pop quizzes in magazines - How smart are you?, Do your friends enjoy your company? Are you a good lover? But they always fall short of what I want to know, and I often wonder at the end "So who made up this test and what makes them the expert?" Not anymore. This refreshingly humorous book consists of 12 tests to take that are not only fun, but are actual documented scientific research. I felt I knew myself better and had the tools to change what I didn't like or better yet, decided that compared to everyone else, I kind of like just who I am. Besides the fact based tests, there are a lot of interesting fun facts about human nature, and great cartoons scattered throughout, making the book witty easy reading. I highly recommend this fascinating and enjoyable read!
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Summary: Interesting and challenging
Review: Ordinarily, I don't read and review self-improvement books. I've read quite a few them in the past and found most of them wanting. Sure, now and then a decent self-help book will come off the press and even I have found it helpful. Most of them, however, are too much the same and intended to either make the author a lot of money or create a new fad, with some self-promoting guru raking in the fame and fortune.
So, when I was offered the opportunity to review "How Do You Compare?", I was hesitant. I wasn't sure I'd be interested in what still another author had to say about improving oneself. But my curiosity was peaked when I learned that the book included twelve simple tests which were based on more complicated tests which had actually been developed and tested themselves by experts in the field of experimental psychology. Since I have a background in testing, evaluation, and quantitative analysis, plus have taken a number of courses in psychology at both the undergraduate and graduate level, I decided, what the heck, I'd read the book and maybe even write a review about it.
"How Do You Compare?" is a very readable book and, in addition to the twelve tests provided, contains a lot of interesting information about the nature, history, and development of various types of evaluation, including intelligent tests, creativity tests, social skills tests, and personality tests in general. Spaced throughout the book, and making the adventure more enjoyable than usual for books in this genre, are cartoons related to the discussion at hand and textual tidbits providing the reader with little-known facts such as the relationship between Graham crackers and sexual behavior. I knew about that one, having heard about Dr. Graham many years ago, but I'd bet most people aren't aware of that peculiar, practically useless, yet very interesting, factoid.
The structure of the book is very simple: get some background information about a part of your mind, take a little test to learn something about yourself, and then compare yourself to thousands of others who have taken the test. The tests are divided into three main sections and a final "big picture" questionnaire with the title, "How satisfied are you with your personality?" The first section includes a brief intelligence test and a test for creativity. The second section includes four tests or sets of questions to check up on your social skills. The third section, which deals with the subject of motivation, includes tests about happiness, cheerfulness, peak experiences, locus of control, and even, -- wouldn't you know it? -- a cheerfulness test for a friend to complete about you.
Most people who take tests such as these are interested in three primary points: How did I score on the test?; What do my answers mean?; How did others score on the test? The author goes into some detail to help the reader, or in this case, the test-taker, deal with these questions. He raises a number of issues related to one's personality profile and suggests possibilities for self-improvement under headings like: Do you have a messy desk?; Can you buy creativity?; Do you drink for inspiration?; Is your date attractive at the end of the night?; and What is your happy life expectancy? -- intriguing questions, these, and the results of the research into them by behavioral scientists may surprise you.
Of course, since the book is within the self-improvement genre, it must also provide some practical advice to help those who want indeed to improve themselves. This it does. At various places throughout the text, the author gives suggestions, both positive and negative, as to how to improve one's performance in life, including the eight ingredients for a successful relationship and, something even I was unaware of, the health benefits of kissing. All my life I thought it was just for fun! Now I know it's healthy, too!
There is one brief discussion the author has in the book that I think especially stands out and I would hope that most of us would pay close attention to it. In the section dealing with intelligence and creativity, he lists what he calls the "creativity killers," those things we say to children, or fail to say, which can impact negatively on a child's ability to become a truly creative individual. As a former educator of young children, I can relate to the importance of this warning.
As self-improvement books go, this one far outdistances most of them I've read. To the credit of the author, and to the advantage of the really serious reader, Williams includes citations for every research paper he mentions so they can be consulted and studied. He also provides an index to the major topics discussed, something not common to books of this type.
Finally, I gladly recommend this book to all who want to learn more about themselves, about how they compare with others, and, above all, how they might go about improving their lives. If you're looking for a self-help book that is based on real scientific research, yet is interesting and fun to read, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything better right now.
Rating:
Summary: How do you compare?
Review: Please excuse me however, I question the resume of the writer and feel that reproduction of others research does not assist anyone in 'discovering' themself! I cannot say that this book is informative without validation of the Mr. William's education and his individual research.
Rating:
Summary: How Do You Compaer is Beyond Compare
Review: This is a fun, facinating, easy-to-read book. The author, a psychologist with 20 years of expertise in measuring people's behavior, took me on a tour of my own personality. We started with a tough, but interesting, intelligence test, then moved onto two very different creativity quizzes before moving on to "social skills" - my strengths and satisfaction with personal relationships. I guess good relationships lead to great sex, because the tour quickly gets into some very sexy tests that both my husband and I enjoyed taking. Then the book discusses happiness and makes you really think about the meaningful things in life that make you happy. The 12 tests round off with motivation and a all-round assessment of your personality.
The tests led to insightful conversations with my husband. In some ways our relationship and sex life has improved based on the discussions we had about this book. It doesn't judge you as good or bad, but makes you consider parts of your personality and contains lots of suggestions for making life more enjoyable.
This book is factual and witty, not dry and analytical. The cartoons are a hoot. How Do You Compare is not like self-help books - it is fun to take the tests, see how you score and then, like the title says, you can see how you compare to hundreds of people who have taken the same tests. The way it is laid out would also make for fun games at parties.
I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in psychology, personalities, or someone who just wants to understand people better.
Rating:
Summary: Take your Personality Inventory!
Review: Wouldn't it be terrific if someone who was an expert on personality testing picked the easiest, most interesting tests, and assembled them in a book? The author took this on and presented it so that the reader could test himself. Between tests, elaborations are provided with a little psychobabble and moderate amounts of interesting trivia - some of it common sense, some surprising.
Starting out in the first chapter - bam - I have to take an IQ test! Am I ready for this? I used to do OK 45 years ago - but at that age, I knew everything. Could I still score highly enough to maintain my self-image?
There are several other tests that run the gamut, my favorite being the last one, which measures one's locus of control. Does your life unfold as a result of your direction or is it controlled by luck, chance, and other factors?
After this obstacle course, a nicely written epilogue left me with an appreciate of the need for tolerance. It seems that between the genetics we were born with and the environment we've experienced for adjustments, we're left with only moderate flexibility for change.
This is a very interesting book which helps one evaluate his favorite subject - himself. It stands alone as a sort of self-help book, and I recommend it highly.
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