What does the way you draw a tree reveal about your personality? That’s the premise behind the Baum Test — a projective personality assessment developed by Swiss psychologist Charles Koch in 1949. The idea is deceptively simple: the choices you make when sketching a tree, the shape of the trunk, how you draw the branches, whether the roots are visible, are thought to reflect something about your inner psychological world. A colleague of mine who specializes in projective assessment has been refining an updated version of this technique and has asked for help gathering data from as many people as possible. The activity takes about three minutes. You’ll draw a single tree, and the system will generate a personality profile based on what you draw. At the end, you’ll be asked to rate how accurately the profile describes you. Give it a try.
This activity was inspired by a post on David Webb’s substack. David is the creator of the All About Psychology website, and I thank him for allowing me to recreate the content of his Substack post into this activity.
You are welcome to host this activity on your own site. Download the two files below. One is an HTML file that contains the majority of what you need, and the other is a Word document that steps you through how to set up the Google Sheets backend (that will hold participant data).
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