What Does Your Favorite The Office Character Say About You?
We used real data science to find out which people love which characters from The Office (U.S.) most. Then we used not-so-real psychoanalysis to explain what we found.
Photo: NBC
Much like Dante’s Inferno or the combined works of Shakespeare, NBC’s The Office offers us a vividly detailed picture of the human condition in all its ugliness. All of our worst and most tragic flaws are on display in Dunder-Mifflin’s Scranton branch: the ignorance of Michael Scott, the arrogance of Dwight Schrute, the hubris of Jim Halpert, and the timidity of Pam Beesly. One of these characters is the very embodiment of your nastiest vices — but an embodiment that’s okay for you to laugh at because it’s Dwight, not you, who is trying to roast a goose that he ran over on his morning commute in the office kitchen.
Ranker’s list of the Best The Office (U.S.) Characters tells us the preferences of over 15,000 fans of this hit comedy, and we’re using that data to guess at what their choices says about them. Is it possible that your favorite Office character has less to do with your own irredeemable personality and more to do with your belief that Prison Mike is funny? Yes, but we’re not going to let that stop us from drawing wild conclusions about people based on their favorite heroes and antiheroes in everybody’s favorite workplace comedy.
People Aged 50 and Up Like Dwight
Photo: Ranker
While those under 50 prefer Michael Scott, the oldest subset of Ranker voters are more likely to vote for Dwight Schrute on our list of Best Office Characters than anyone else. When you think about it, Dwight does embody plenty of the values we tend to associate with boomers: he’s good at his job, he values self-reliance and hard work, and he takes himself so seriously that he’s unable to tell when people are trolling him.
Take the time Jim and Pam convinced Dwight that the CIA was enlisting him in a top-secret mission, for example. Now consider the fact that a group of predominantly older Americans were very recently tricked into believing they were fighting a conspiracy happening at the highest level of government. At least Pam and Jim were nice enough to call the whole prank off before Dwight started his trip to D.C.
Conservatives Respect Jim, Liberals Sympathize with Kevin
Photo: Ranker
Conservative ideology loves a winner: right-wing heroes like Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, and Ayn Rand share a belief that the strongest in society are the most deserving of our respect, as their success not only enriches their own lives, but the lives of those around them. And if there’s a winner in The Office, it’s Jim Halpert. He gets the girl of his dreams, constantly outsmarts antagonists like Dwight and Andy, and eventually leaves Dunder-Mifflin to start his own sports marketing company.
Kevin Malone, on the other hand, is not a winner. He’s the butt of his coworkers’, he’s unlucky in love, and he’s so incompetent at his job that he’s eventually fired. But liberal voters understand that behind all these blunders is a kind, well-meaning, and often astute character who deserves our esteem like anyone else — even if he can’t carry a pot of his own chili around the office without screwing it up. It’s consistent with the political tendency of lefties to sympathize with the American everyman.
Germans Favor Creed
Photo: Ranker