Alpha, Beta or Omega Test

About this test

Alpha, beta, omega: three words that became an all-purpose social ranking online. Before you answer, one detail worth knowing. That hierarchy comes from a study of wolves in captivity, popularised in the 1970s by biologist David Mech. Mech then spent decades publicly asking people to stop citing his book: watching wild wolves, he found that a pack is not a dominance pyramid but a family, where the "alphas" are simply the parents. He asked his own publisher to stop reprinting it.

So the metaphor is wrong about wolves. It remains useful for describing something very real about humans — the position each of us instinctively takes in a group. Who opens the meeting, who patches things up, who checks where the exit is.

This test measures that position and nothing else. Fifteen concrete situations rather than statements like "I am charismatic," because self-ratings are notoriously bad. And a reminder: the role you hold at work is almost never the one you hold with the friends you grew up with.