What Would Your Role Be in an Apocalypse?
Nobody survives alone, and everybody thinks they would
The fantasy is always the same: one person, well equipped, against the world. The reality of every actual disaster is groups - people who could not have managed a week on their own, organised badly, getting through anyway. So the interesting question is not whether you would survive but what you would be for. Five jobs, all of them necessary, and the group that is missing any one of them has a serious problem within about a fortnight.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Ten questions, none of them serious. Answer with what you would actually do rather than with what would look good in the film.
What it measures
Which of five jobs you would drift into. It measures nothing - it is a way of asking how you behave when a plan is needed, which is a question you can answer without anything ending.
Possible results
The One With The Plan
Somebody has to decide, and it is going to be you
The One Who Keeps People Alive
Unglamorous, and the reason anybody is still here
The One Who Goes First
Somebody has to open the door
The Diplomat
The group does not split, because of you
The One Who Makes Things Work
Water, heat, light, a door that closes
Common questions
Would the loner really do worst?
In every account of actual disasters, yes. Survival is mostly logistics, and logistics is mostly other people - somebody has to sleep while somebody watches, somebody has to be able to carry you. The lone survivor is a genre convention rather than an observation, and it persists because a group is harder to film than a face.
An honest note Entirely for fun. Nothing here is measured and nothing predicts how anyone behaves in a real emergency - the honest finding from disaster research is that people are considerably better than fiction suggests, with cooperation being the normal response and panic being rare, and that almost nobody can predict in advance what they will do. The five roles are a writing device. If you want the version of this question with actual research behind it, the tests on how you handle stress and on resilience are built on studies rather than on scenery.
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