Cousin Alignment Chart
Background
About a week ago I gave my brother and 7 out of my 8 cousins a survey to help figure out the new alignment charts for the 10 of us.
I created one a few years back based on my gut intuition, but people change and this time I wanted to be more “scientific” about it.
So I made a spreadsheet and printed out some forms for people to fill out.
Everyone rated everyone else across the two dimensions: Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic and Good-Neutral-Evil.
Lawful and Good counted as +1. Chaotic and Evil counted as -1. Neutral counted as 0.
I tallied everything up in Airtable, then I plotted the results on my iPad.
Here’s what I found.
Results
Scatter Plot
I plotted everyone’s scores on a grid, and color-coded by family:
- Green for the Steiners
- Red for the Pitermans
- Yellow for the Rays
- Blue for the Baughs
First I noticed some correlation: chaotic and evil tend to go together. And conversely, so do lawful and good.
High Level Stats
First, I found the people with the max values in each category:
Most Lawful: Becca
Most Good: Sergey
Most Chaotic: Oli
Most Evil: Nikka
Most Neutral: Sammy & Pritam
The average score sat at -1.5, -1.5, which is closest to Sami, our previous True Neutral.
The range of Lawful/Chaotic values was 2.5x times greater than the Good/Evil range.
I should mention that one person objected to the survey on the grounds that none of us were actually “evil”.
But as a whole, we skew Chaotic/Evil.
3 people were Good, 7 were Evil. Same went for Lawful vs Chaotic.
And the person complaining turned out to arguably be one of the evilest…
Dominant Traits
Next, I looked at everyone’s dominant traits, meaning which trait had a larger absolute value of the two.
Cy, Becca and Sergey were Lawful dominant.
Oli, Nikka and Jeeti were Chaotic dominant.
Taty and Thomas were Evil dominant.
Pritam and Sammy were Neutral dominant (both traits were tied in magnitude).
No one was Good dominant…
Total Opinions
Finally, I looked at the people with the most/fewest opinions. Meaning, I counted the number of NOT neutral scores for people.
9 cousins voting across 2 dimensions meant the highest score anyone could get was 18, if you got all Good/Evil/Chaotic/Lawful. And obviously the least was 0 if everyone rated you as Neutral.
I did this to account for scores canceling each other out. Someone getting all neutrals is probably different than someone getting half goods and half evils, for example.
The person with most opinions was Nikka, with a total of 14, followed by Jeeti and Oli with 13, and then Pritam with 12.
The people with the fewest opinions were Sergey and Sammy, with only 8, followed by Becca and Thomas with 9, then Cy ad Taty with 10.
Creating The Chart
To create the chart, the first thing I had to decide was who to put in one cell together, since there were 10 cousins and only 9 slots. Taty and Thomas were closest, having the same amount of Evil and a difference of 1 in Chaotic.
Next, I treated each point as a node on a graph and gave myself two rules:
- Edges between nodes can’t intersect
- Aim to minimize the overall length of the edges
There were two candidate alignments that I had to pick from:
Let’s compare side-by-side:
To decide between the two I started deleting edges that were the same in both, to see which one had the shortest sum:
Then I looked at the difference in length of the remaining lines. It should be pretty obvious but if not, one way we can do this is to eliminate comparable lines:
And we’re left with:
Making the top chart superior.
Conclusion
Looking at the previous chart and new one:
We can see that:
3 people stayed where they were:
- Oli
- Sami
- Thomas
3 people moved 1 spot:
- Sergey
- Nikka
- Jeeti
3 people moved 2 spots:
- Cy
- Taty
- Becca
And 1 person moved 3 spots:
- Pritam
What are my thoughts on the results?
Honestly not sure how much to read into it, it was more just for fun, and my brain works in strange ways. I think the Chaotic/Lawful Columns were pretty spot on, but the good evil was a little harder to judge, just given the spread. Meaning one more person voting could impact a lot of Good/Neutral alignments, but not so much Chaotic/Lawful alignments.
Other than that, I noticed a slight Good preference for siblings. Meaning people thought their siblings scored higher than their cousins did, but it was a small effect.
But hopefully this settles things… at least until next year.
