Common Sense Test

50 everyday situations, one best answer each

10 min · Free · No account

Common Sense Test: A person on a sturdy step stool reaching for a high kitchen shelf while an eTestor mug sits on the counter

What is a common sense test?

A test of practical judgment: what you would do in ordinary situations at home, with money, around safety and with other people, where one answer is clearly the sensible one. It is not a knowledge quiz or an IQ test. Common sense is harder to pin down than it sounds: in a 2024 study of 2,046 people rating 4,407 claims, Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts found that shared common sense is rare, and few people agree on more than a small share of claims. That is why every question here sticks to situations with one clearly best answer.

About this test

Five areas, ten questions each: Home (cooking, cleaning, small fixes, planning a busy day), Money (prices, deals, scams, bills), Safety (fires, gas, ladders, ice, driving tired), People (reading a situation and handling it well) and How things work (weight, heat, freezing, pressure). Each question has four options and one clearly best answer.

What you'll discover

Home
Running a household: cooking, cleaning, fixing small things and planning a busy day.
Money
Comparing prices, spotting a scam and keeping bills in the right order.
Safety
Knowing what to do, and what not to do, when something could hurt you or someone else.
People
Reading a situation and handling it in a way that keeps trust.
How things work
Simple physical sense: weight, heat, ice, pressure and how objects behave.

Understanding the Common Sense Test

This common sense test gives you 50 everyday situations, ten in each of five areas: home, money, safety, people and how things work. Each has four options and one clearly best answer, from a pan of oil that catches fire to a phone plan that only looks cheaper or a coworker's flat "fine". It takes about 10 minutes. Your total score is free when you finish; the full report scores each area, so you can see whether a gap sits with money, safety or people.

Common sense is a phrase everyone uses and few have measured. Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts asked 2,046 people to rate 4,407 claims. The claims rated most commonsensical were plainly worded, fact-like statements about everyday physical reality, and social perceptiveness went with individual common sense while age and gender did not (PNAS, 2024, doi:10.1073/pnas.2309535121). They also found that collective common sense is rare: what seems obvious to you often isn't obvious to most others. So we kept to situations with one defensible answer and left out anything that depends on taste, culture or local rules.

Our questions work like a situational judgment test: a short scenario and a choice of responses. Employers have used such tests for a long time, and a meta-analysis found they predict job performance usefully and overlap with general cognitive ability (McDaniel and colleagues, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001, doi:10.1037/0021-9010.86.4.730). Ours is not one of those validated tests, and it has no norms yet. Most questions are easy on purpose, so a high score is expected and the misses are where the useful information is. Picking the right answer on a calm screen is also easier than doing it in the moment.

Where the Common Sense Test comes from

There is no standard psychological test of common sense. The nearest research is on situational judgment tests, which present a scenario and a choice of responses and have a long history in hiring, and on what makes a claim commonsensical, studied by Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts in 2024. This test is our own construction in the situational judgment style, not a published instrument.

How the Common Sense Test is scored

Five areas of ten questions, each scored as the number of best answers (0 to 10), plus a total out of 50. Guessing alone averages 12.5 of 50. Most items are easy by design, so scores bunch near the top and the test is better at showing a blind spot than at ranking people. It has no norms yet. Whiting and Watts found that collective common sense is rare: at most, a small share of people agree on more than a small share of claims, which is why every item here keeps to a situation with one clearly best answer.

Popular framework with contested empirical support

Whiting, M. E., & Watts, D. J. (2024). A framework for quantifying individual and collective common sense. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(4), e2309535121.

Questions people ask

Is the common sense test free?

Yes. The test and your total score are free, with no account needed: just your email at the end. Every score, the written analysis and the certificate are in the full report: $1.99$2.41 in the first 30 minutes after you finish, $3.99$4.83 after that, or included in eTestor Unlimited.

What are some common sense questions?

Ours look like these, which are not in the test itself. A pot of pasta is about to boil over: what's the quickest fix? Turn the heat down. Your phone is at 5% and you'll be out all day: what do you do before you leave? Charge it or take a charger. Milk is buy one, get one free, but you can't finish two before they go off: is it a deal? Not if half of it ends up in the bin.

Is common sense the same as intelligence?

No, though they overlap. In the 2001 meta-analysis by McDaniel and colleagues, situational judgment tests correlated .46 with general cognitive ability: clearly related, but far from the same thing. A link of that size leaves plenty of room to be quick at puzzles and weaker at practical choices, or the other way round. For reasoning, take the IQ test.

Are there trick questions?

No. Every question has one answer that is clearly best wherever you live: no trick wording, no trivia and nothing that depends on local rules. Some wrong options are written to sound right at a glance, like turning a stuck lid clockwise harder, so read all four before you answer.

Is this a street smart test?

Close to one. It asks about practical choices in ordinary situations, the kind people call street smart, rather than facts learned at school. It can't tell you on its own whether you're more street smart or book smart. Taking the IQ test as well gives you the other half of that comparison, though neither score is the whole picture.