The human being is a gregarious and sociable being From family clans and tribes to the increasingly globalized society in which we live today, throughout history we have been building and trying to improve different types of organizational systems that allow us to be in contact with others, maintaining increasing number of relationships.
But contact and the correct understanding of social interactions can be more complex than it seems, and in some cases there may be difficulties in being able to put oneself in the other’s shoes or correctly interpret what is happening.
In this sense, there are different proposals and instruments that allow evaluating the degree of competence and social understanding, in order to detect possible deficits in this sense and contribute to training or treating any difficulties that may exist. One of the instruments that allow this evaluation is the Faux Pas Test, which we are going to talk about throughout this article
The Faux-Pas test is a highly known psychological evaluation instrument, which allows us to assess the degree of adaptation and social understanding through the interpretation of social situations
The test in question has a total of twenty short stories in which some type of social interaction occurs, in ten of which some type of inappropriate, inconsiderate or clumsy act occurs on the part of one of the characters towards another or others. It has reduced versions and different adaptations, including one in Spanish: the Gaffe Test.
It is an instrument that allows assessing the ability to understand, empathy and the existence of a theory of mind in the subjects evaluated. The latter refers to the ability to understand the mental state of another and to attribute to them the ability to think and have intentions and emotions different from our own.
Developed in 1999 by Baron-Cohen, the Faux-Pas test Its original purpose was to evaluate the ability to understand social situations and differentiate between performance in said task among minors (between seven and eleven years old) with Asperger’s syndrome and normotypical minors. However, over the years its target audience has expanded, with versions for children and adults existing, and it is used to assess the capacity for social understanding in different problems.
Thus, in addition to its use to assess social competence in people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, it has also been used in populations with behavioral disorders, schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder and even psychopathy, among others. Likewise, it is also used in people with lesions in the frontal lobe and especially in the orbitofrontal, and also in some cases of dementia.
Test administration
Administration of the Faux Pas test is relatively simple Each of the stories that are part of the test are presented to the subject one by one, reading them and giving him a copy so that he can read and see them himself.
Once each story has been read, the subject is asked if anyone in it has done or said anything inappropriate. If you answer negatively, you are asked two control questions that allow you to assess your level of understanding of what happened in the story.
If the answer is positive, we proceed to ask who has done something inappropriate, why or what they should have taken into account, what they should have done or said, if the protagonist of the story has realized the reason for his act. was inappropriate and how the person must have felt.
Each of these questions aims to assess whether the person to whom the test is applied has the capacity to understand the fact that an action is inappropriate or considered clumsy at a given moment (third question), whether he or she can assess the intentionality of the speaker (fourth question), interpret their beliefs and knowledge (fifth question) and if they are capable of being empathetic and understanding their emotions (sixth question). After these questions, we will finish by asking the same control questions as in the previous case (in this case, the seventh and eighth).
How to rate?
The correction of this test requires analyzing each of the answers that the subject has given The first question will be scored based on whether the answer given is correct or incorrect, regardless of whether we are dealing with a story in which inappropriate acts or blunders occur or whether we are dealing with a control story.
The second, in which the question is asked about who commits the mistake, any answer that identifies the person in question will be considered correct, without remembering the name itself being necessary.
A different case occurs in this question in the case of the control stories, since not answering will be scored positively while answering will be penalized (after all, in the control stories no one is committing any inappropriate act or mistake). of paw).
To assess each of the abilities assessed in this test, all the scores of the question that corresponds to said ability will be added and subsequently divided by the sum of the products of the correct answers to the control questions in the stories with inappropriate content and the product of the correct answers to the control questions in the control stories.
The maximum score is 30, and the lower the score, the more difficulty in the different areas analyzed However, it is not advisable to focus on a final score but rather it is preferable to assess each area separately.
