Mental Age Test

Your chronological age is the number of years since you were born. Your mental age is a different idea: the age your thinking, habits and choices most resemble. Two people who are both 30 can act, plan and decide very differently, and mental age is a way to describe that gap.

The term has a long history. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon used it in 1905 to describe how a child performed on a test compared with other children, and William Stern turned it into the intelligence quotient in 1912. Modern psychology has moved on from that formula, but the plain-English idea, how old does your mind act, is still how most people use the phrase. If you want the original formula, the mental age calculator covers it.

Most mental age quizzes give you a number and stop there. This one tells you where it came from. Your result blends three parts, each estimated as an age and then combined.

• Lifestyle (40%). Four questions about tastes and habits. Each answer is tied to an age that the choice is typical of, from a child building a den to someone who prefers an early night.
• Maturity (40%). Five everyday scenarios and two self-view statements. Each answer is graded from impulsive to measured, and the average is mapped onto an age.
• Reasoning (20%). Three short puzzles: a number sequence, an odd-one-out and a pattern grid. Each right answer adds a year or two, up to five.

The three parts are averaged with those weights, then kept between 8 and 80. If you entered your age, the result shows the gap.

It cannot tell you your IQ, your personality type, or whether you are mentally healthy. It has not been validated against a research sample, and 14 questions is a short sample of anyone. Use it to start a conversation with yourself, not to settle one.

If your result reads older than you expected, you may be in a minority. In a large study, Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin (2006) found that people feel younger than their real age from about their mid-twenties onwards, and that by later life the gap is roughly 20%. A 60-year-old will often say they feel nearer to 48.

That gap is about how people see themselves. A mental age test asks a different question: what do your choices look like when you answer specific situations? Both can be true at once. You can feel young and still plan like a veteran, or feel your age and still pick the lie-in.

Mental age and IQ started life as the same idea, but they are not the same thing now. IQ is a score from a test of reasoning that compares you with people of your own age, and it stays fairly steady through adulthood. This mental age test blends your reasoning with your lifestyle and judgement, so it moves with your habits. To see how the old formula turns an IQ into an age, use the mental age calculator. To get a reasoning score, take the IQ test.