QUESTION 1 / 120 of 12 answered
Your ideal Friday night?
What "mental age" means, in short
Mental age began as a serious idea: in 1905, Alfred Binet measured a child's thinking against what typical children of each age could do. Today, psychologists study something closer to this quiz, called subjective age: how old you feel, which often differs from your real age.
This quiz is just for fun. Its answers are tagged with ages based on common habits and stereotypes, not research norms, so treat your result as a conversation starter rather than a measurement.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Format
- 12 questions, 5 answers each, each tagged with an age
- Result
- The average of your answers' ages
- Science version
- Subjective age: "How old do you feel?"
- Origin
- Binet & Simon's intelligence scale, 1905
~20%younger is how most adults over 40 feelIn a study of Danish adults, people from about age 40 onward said they felt around a fifth younger than their real age. Young people tend to feel slightly older.3
1905Mental age is born. Binet and Simon's tests sorted tasks by the age at which most children could pass them, giving each child a "mental level".1
1912The first IQ. William Stern proposed dividing mental age by real age. Multiplied by 100, that became the "intelligence quotient".2
2006Feeling younger. Rubin and Berntsen found the gap between felt and real age grows through adulthood.3
2014 · metaIt may matter. A meta-analysis found people who feel younger tend to live longer, though health may drive both.4
- Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1905). Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux. L'Année Psychologique, 11, 191–244.
- Stern, W. (1912). Die psychologischen Methoden der Intelligenzprüfung. Barth.
- Rubin, D. C., & Berntsen, D. (2006). People over forty feel 20% younger than their age. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(5), 776–780.
- Westerhof, G. J., et al. (2014). The influence of subjective aging on health and longevity: A meta-analysis of longitudinal data. Psychology and Aging, 29(4), 793–802.