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The Shawshank Redemption characters personality data for the Statistical Quiz

The dataset of the Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz (SWCPQ) includes characters from the fictional universe of The Shawshank Redemption. The SWCPQ can operate as a "What The Shawshank Redemption 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 6 characters from this universe. They are ordered in the list below by their notability (see Note 1).

Notability Name
87.95Andy Dufresne
79.15Ellis Boyd 'Red' Redding
48.6Brooks Hatlen
45.2Samuel Norton
38.1Byron Hadley
30.6Heywood

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).
47% 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 The Shawshank Redemption?". The distribution of their responses are below.

# Response Count
1 It's the worst 8
2 It's bad 9
3 It's okay 261
4 It's good 2829
5 It's my favorite 886

This gives it an average score of 4.15 / 5. Making it 36th 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 4.2
Female 4.12

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
reasonable (not deranged)0.08354123
sheriff (not outlaw)0.08074094
angelic (not demonic)0.07164090
genius (not dunce)0.06734144
masculine (not feminine)0.0664212
orderly (not chaotic)0.06234138
scientific (not artistic)0.06123619
nurturing (not poisonous)0.05694099
disarming (not creepy)0.05564115
altruistic (not selfish)0.04814101
logical (not emotional)0.04364194
tame (not wild)0.04213528
mature (not juvenile)0.0423511
gracious (not feisty)0.04124091
genuine (not sarcastic)0.03983550
frugal (not lavish)0.03834090
slovenly (not stylish)0.03224146
conventional (not creative)0.03224203
formal (not intimate)0.03054146
blissful (not haunted)0.02933510
obedient (not rebellious)0.02814140
loyal (not traitorous)0.02444199
deep (not shallow)0.02034168
ivory-tower (not blue-collar)0.01964089
skeptical (not spiritual)0.01764179
strict (not lenient)0.01764168
reclusive (not social)0.01644102
high-tech (not low-tech)0.01183552
nerd (not jock)0.01184119
sober (not indulgent)0.00954091
stinky (not fresh)0.00844094
meek (not bossy)0.00664112
awkward (not charming)0.00634202
beta (not alpha)0.00614095
mainstream (not arcane)0.00484103
stick-in-the-mud (not adventurous)0.00374098

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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