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How I Met Your Mother characters personality data for the Statistical Quiz

The dataset of the Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz (SWCPQ) includes characters from the fictional universe of How I Met Your Mother. The SWCPQ can operate as a "What How I Met Your Mother character are you?" test, click the link above to access it. This page aggregates the crowd sourced data that the quiz is built upon.

Characters

The dataset has 5 characters from this universe. They are ordered in the list below by their notability (see Note 1).

Notability Name
72.5Robin Scherbatsky
72.4Barney Stinson
68.9Ted Mosby
61.15Lily Aldrin
56.5Marshall Eriksen

To see how each character was rated by users, view their individual page.

Viewership

The graph below shows what percent of people selected this universe as something they knew well enough to rate characters from by the age of the user (for users between 16 and 60 years of age).
41% 0%
16
20
30
40
50
60

Rating

As part of the survey where they rated characters, users were also asked the question "How do you rate How I Met Your Mother?". The distribution of their responses are below.

# Response Count
1 It's the worst 28
2 It's bad 121
3 It's okay 1571
4 It's good 4786
5 It's my favorite 1849

This gives it an average score of 3.99 / 5. Making it 117th out of the 369 universes in the dataset ordered by rating.

The average rating may be hard to generalize, though; the users of one online personality quiz could not be representative of the population in important ways. And there are some very obvious things you can point to: users of this quiz are more likely to be young and more likely to be women.

There are several different ways that average ratings can be broken down. Here are average scores by gender:

Gender Average rating
Male 3.99
Female 4.0

The responses to the personality quiz can also be cross referenced with the universe ratings to see how personality affects it. The table below shows the correlation between a user's response to a specific self report item and their rating of this universe.

Item Correlation with rating n
jock (not nerd)0.08678578
social (not reclusive)0.06918511
sarcastic (not genuine)0.06047136
fresh (not stinky)0.05698504
mainstream (not arcane)0.04828517
alpha (not beta)0.04768490
stylish (not slovenly)0.04618579
adventurous (not stick-in-the-mud)0.04458506
blissful (not haunted)0.04147025
charming (not awkward)0.04138760
feminine (not masculine)0.04048803
spiritual (not skeptical)0.03948676
wild (not tame)0.03937139
high-tech (not low-tech)0.03487124
lavish (not frugal)0.03398460
sober (not indulgent)0.02528488
bossy (not meek)0.02488568
sheriff (not outlaw)0.02428491
lenient (not strict)0.02398726
ivory-tower (not blue-collar)0.02268459
intimate (not formal)0.02258585
loyal (not traitorous)0.02178731
poisonous (not nurturing)0.01968497
gracious (not feisty)0.01898487
obedient (not rebellious)0.0188574
disarming (not creepy)0.01798537
emotional (not logical)0.01788711
deep (not shallow)0.01738665
angelic (not demonic)0.01688498
deranged (not reasonable)0.01118592
juvenile (not mature)0.00476988
genius (not dunce)0.00378614
creative (not conventional)0.00358771
selfish (not altruistic)0.00298508
chaotic (not orderly)0.00118620
scientific (not artistic)0.00017317

How these items predict the ratings for this universe can be compared to how the same items predict the ratings of other universes. The universes with the most similar patterns on the predictors are:

Notes

  1. Notability is computed as the average of 204: important (not irrelevant) and 401: main character (not side character).
  Updated: 24 February 2026
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