The Animal in You
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| Author | Roy Feinson |
|---|---|
| Language | English, Various |
| Subject | Personality Test |
| Genre | Psychology, biology |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Griffin |
Publication date | 1995 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Paperback |
| ISBN | 0312180403 |
| Followed by | Animal Attraction |
The Animal in You (St. Martin’s Griffin) is a 1995 bestselling non-fiction book by Roy Feinson, which posits a biological basis as to why people tend to remind us of animals. It hypothesizes that through the process of convergent evolution, every person exhibits a niche set of behaviors enabling them to cope with their particular social milieu in the same way as individual animal species adapt to their environments. People unconsciously modulate their behaviors to create stable social situations, much in the same way that durable ecosystems necessarily contain a wide diversity of species. In nature, evolution ensures that every niche of the food web is filled and re-filled by different specialized species. The overabundance of predatory creatures will wreak havoc on an ecosystem, while the absence of predators results in overpopulation of smaller prey species, so evolution continually updates species design. Humans so completely dominate their environment that our social structures are ecosystems unto themselves, and each of us must find our own niche in a competitive world. Depending on our individual physical characteristics, people subconsciously adopt personalities that form complementary webs with others in their lives. Feinson believes that this is why the range of human personalities dovetails so tightly with survival stratagems of species in the wild. The mirroring of human personalities and animal species extends to the ratio between predators and prey in the wild. Animal species with large aggressive characteristics, like lions, bears and rhinoceroses, cannot be supported in the large numbers (compared to rabbits, mice and rats), which is why human social groups generally feature a stable mix of a wide range of personality types. For example, since aggressive, overbearing personalities place disproportional stress on their social environments, smaller human personalities like mice, otters, beavers, and sheep tend to dominate the concrete jungle.
The Personality Test
The Animal in You features a personality test unique to a book format. The reader answers nine questions about his or her personality and physical attributes and the test returns one of forty five animal personality types. While it is relatively trivial to create this kind of test on a computer, resolving a test with over 70,0000 possible outcomes in book form required a wholly novel solution. The challenge was to collapse the 45 possible outcomes (the animal personalities) from the possible response combinations. Many possible solutions were attempted—including a flip chart that calculated the results—until a process was found that condensed thousands of possible answers into a few dozen pages. The test is also unique in the way it uses an interdependent weighting scheme, wherein each question is assigned a different weight depending on how the other questions are answered. For example, if the subject is a physically big man, the fact that he is shy would be much more significant when compared to a physically small, shy man. In addition, the test weights extreme attributes with an exponentially higher score. The follow-up book to The Animal in You, Animal Attraction, was commissioned by St. Martin’s Griffin in 1999 and explored how the different animal personalities interacted with each other, in terms of friendship, work compatibility and marriage.
Animalinyou.com
Created in 1998, the book's website Animalinyou.com, was one of the first comprehensive personality tests available on the web and as of 2013, with over one million people taking the test every year; attracting widespread commentary and spawning many imitators.
Languages
The book has been translated into ten different languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Czech, Hebrew and French.
Media
The Animal in You has been featured on CNN, The Dr. Phil Show, CBS The Talk, and hundreds of call-in radio shows in the U.S. and Canada. Western Kentucky University includes Animal in You material in its CoursePack in 2010 and 2011. The test is employed by business consultants to shed light on employee interactions and improve morale by grouping various personality types with each other.