Is This Gaslighting, or Are You Just Disagreeing? The Quiz

Gaslighting has become one of those words that now arrives at arguments before either person has finished the sentence. Someone remembers Tuesday differently: gaslighting. Someone denies saying the thing they definitely said: gaslighting. Someone gets defensive, changes the subject, tells a lie, has a terrible memory, or insists with the confidence of a person who has never once considered being wrong: apparently we have already opened the psychological crime lab.

The problem is not that gaslighting is imaginary. The problem is that the word becomes less useful when it has to cover every disagreement, contradiction, lie, defensive maneuver, and badly remembered conversation. Two people can honestly remember the same event differently. A person can lie because they do not want to get caught. A person can argue because they are stubborn. A person can minimize harm because accountability is uncomfortable. All of those things can be maddening without automatically becoming gaslighting.

Gaslighting becomes a more useful description when the fight is no longer only about what happened. The repeated pattern begins to target your ability to know what happened. Your memory becomes the problem. Your perception becomes the problem. Your emotional reaction becomes evidence that you are unreliable. Contradictions stop being things to resolve and start becoming tools for making one person's version of reality the only version allowed in the room.

That distinction is the whole quiz. We are not trying to determine whether somebody is a villain, assign a diagnosis, or prove intent from twelve multiple-choice answers. We are looking at the pattern: when two accounts collide, does the disagreement stay about the event, or does your basic confidence in your own perception become collateral damage?

So let us once again apply the most rigorous instrument available to modern philosophy: a glossy-magazine quiz with enough structure to be useful and enough jokes to keep us from convening a tribunal over one disputed trip to Target.

The Quiz