“ BuzzFeed quizzes are crafted to create the illusion of truth, or potential truth,” writes the journalist Caroline O’Donovan, in explaining the fad.
Indeed, if there’s any one way to characterize quizzes’ mystique, it’s probably that, through all their many iterations, they have somehow managed to tightrope-walk the line between entertainment and science, or at least something approaching science. Beyond vanity and narcissism and harmless fun, taking a personality quiz helps me get out of my own head.Īffiliation with these more legitimate-seeming forms of personality analysis has always given the personality quiz a vague air of authority. today, including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Somewhere around 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies still use the Myers-Briggs in the U.S. While many of these tests, including the Myers-Briggs, have since been dismissed by the scientific community as unreliable-if not dangerously discriminatory-they, too, have persisted, perhaps in part because they at least provide a framework for otherwise-difficult office conversations. In-depth psychological assessments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator began popping up in the first half of the 20th century for the purpose of scanning and sorting employees in industrial workplaces. This stretch neatly overlaps with the history of the popular quiz’s buttoned-up, high-achieving sibling: the personality test. The journalist Sarah Laskow has traced its origin in America at least as far back as the late 19th century, “when ladies’ magazines started gaining traction and the yellow press would try anything to sell papers.” But the quiz has persisted with remarkable consistency since, with spikes in popularity during a quick magazine boom immediately post-WWII, the Cosmopolitan quizzes of the 1960s and ’70s, and today’s ubiquitous BuzzFeed quizzes. No one seems to know when the personality quiz first gained a foothold in popular culture. On Meet Yourself’s spine, a silver-painted mirror depicts the personality quiz’s allure: See yourself as you really are. And you’re not the only one who sees the results. On the internet, anything you do is like taking a personality quiz: Everywhere you click reveals something about you. But the company’s methods nonetheless expose the growing scale of personality analysis online-and the dangers that come with it. Whether this firm, Cambridge Analytica, has actually used predictive profiles to influence people isn’t certain reports suggest it hasn’t, at least not directly.
Its goal: the creation of digital profiles that can predict-and possibly exploit-Americans’ values, anxieties, and political leanings. election, a secretive data firm hired by Donald Trump’s campaign boasted that it has been using quizzes for years to gather personal information about millions of voters. But these new online quizzes have a dark edge that their analog predecessors didn’t. Facebook newsfeeds are filled with BuzzFeed quizzes and other oddball questionnaires that tell you which city you should actually live in, which ousted Arab Spring ruler you are, and which Hogwarts house you belong in. The book has been described as a Freudian Choose Your Own Adventure, which is accurate enough: It’s like Give Yourself Goosebumps, but instead of escaping the Carnival of Horrors at the end, you learn that you have commitment problems.Ĭan Personality Be Changed? Scott Barry KaufmanĬlearly, personality quizzes have some sort of perennial appeal. “As you travel across the network of questions and data by your private track, your story unfolds and your character is explained,” the introduction teases. Somewhere in the middle, you’re categorized as one of 15 rivers-the Nile, Seine, Thames, Missouri, and so on-and eventually you’re offered long-winded personality breakdowns. Are your parents dead? Have you ever had the sensation of standing outside your own body? Do Mickey Mouse cartoons freak you out? What do you think of unskimmed milk?Īs you tally “yes” and “no” answers, the book directs you to new sections based on your responses. Published in 1936, Meet Yourself is a 336-page home-psychoanalysis test that promises to “‘X-ray’ the reader’s fundamental character.” It does so with an interminable line of questions both probing and random. So says Meet Yourself As You Really Are, the oldest, longest, and WTF-est personality quiz I’ve taken. I’m capable of infidelity without much remorse. I’m adaptable, but to a fault I rarely see danger ahead. I yearn for new experiences and deep connections with people.
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