Online Personality Quizzes

Musings on the internet craze

Everyone knows they are spurious, at best, so why do we continue to take them?

by Miranda M. Garcia

In the last couple of years, the online community has witnessed a peak interest in personality quizzes — from the flippant, college-student-driven web site, Buzzfeed, to the most respected news outlets, everyone seemed to be partaking. In fact, in 2013 the most popular “story” featured in the New York Times was not a story at all; it was a quiz approximating your geographic origin(s) based on your language usage. While we have made it more than halfway into 2014, the online personality quiz is still going strong. So what makes it so attractive and why, despite our best judgment, do we continue to take it?

Perhaps the most immediate appeal is its simplicity. Unlike more in-depth, psychology-based personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the online personality quiz is short, consists exclusively of multiple choice questions (often aided by images), and delivers instant, digestible results. There are no acronyms or detailed trait analyses. It is as simple as, “What kind of cookie are you?” Snickerdoodle (thanks for asking).

But our obsession must be motivated by more than just the “quick and easy” factor. After all, some of the most universally odious tasks are far from time-consuming or difficult (e.g. taking out the trash, washing dishes, sending “Thank you” notes, etc.). My hunch is that the oftentimes specious online personality quiz taps into something much deeper — our perennial search of self.

Of course, no personality quiz will ever reveal new information about who we are, but they provide us with models or sample identities, if you will, that we aspire to or with which we would like to identify. Whether or not we are really like Lauren Bacall or Humphrey Bogart (from “Which classic actress are you?”) is irrelevant; our acceptance of the quiz’s result reaffirms a specific, consciously-crafted sense of self. This ready adoption or perhaps more accurate, self-ascription, strongly echoes the work of psychologist Bertram R. Forer, who in the 1950s tested the now-infamous “Forer Effect” — people’s tendency to interpret vague personality descriptions (think horoscopes) as applying to them, even if they are written to apply to a wide audience. The significance of the Forer effect, however, lies not in the phenomenon itself, but in the motivations behind its occurrence: the personality summaries are more often than not positive and therefore, desirable.

In the case of online personality quizzes, this is particularly true of results that people choose to not only accept as true, but to also share. Broadcasting our quiz results on social media helps us tell ourselves, as well as others, a particular story about who we are. Whether we take and share a silly, almost nonsensical quiz or a more serious one, we are actively participating in narrative construction. When we tell stories about ourselves, we inherently assign meaning to events and characters in our lives through selection and omission. It may not be the whole truth, but through repetition and reinforcement, our stories become our truth. The wide adoption of narrative analysis across the social sciences is a testament to just how fundamental our stories are to the understanding of individuals and groups.

And what’s more, we see through most online personality quizzes that we are the heroes of these stories. As we know from our research at Olson Zaltman Associates, the hero archetype is empowering and self-reinforcing, giving the individual a sense of agency and importance. It is no wonder, then, that we cannot get enough of these quizzes.

Ultimately, the recent online personality quiz craze stems from more than just a desire for entertainment, it is evident of our need for introspection and self-awareness, our constant crafting of identity, and our need for confirmation and validation thereof. The quiz format may be a fad, but the underlying exercise is timeless.