What Do Other People Find Attractive About Your Personality?
For the sake of fun, I took a short quiz on Buzzfeed testing “What do other people find attractive about your personality?” Although I was aware of its lack of accuracy, I figured it would be a fun way to find more(?) about what others thought about me. The quiz consisted of 7 short multiple-choice questions. The content of the questions varied a lot; from questions about your best physical feature to choosing a caring Disney parent.
Other than the fact I was relying on an online quiz from Buzzfeed to answer what other people thought of my personality, measuring ones personality accurately obviously takes more than 7 questions. (Even the MMPI-2 has 567 items!) However, unlike a person’s personality, is it even possible to “measure” what other people think about someone through a multiple-choice questionnaire? While the quiz claims to measure what “other” people think about my personality, the quiz fails to explain who these other people are and how every one of those “other people” came to agree on one trait that they found attractive about me. It is very possible that different people may find different things “attractive” in a person. It is also possible that a person may have many attractive traits! They also failed to add more variable “personality” related questions. There are no questions asking how social a person is or how empathetic a person is. Making more variable questions can help solve singling out to one of the many “attractive” traits a person might have.
Another factor that came across my mind was, their meaning of attractive. The quiz does not explain to the reader in what terms they refer to the word attractive — Does it mean being romantically attractive? Or being a socially attractive person? The two meanings are very different from each other and bring upon further confusion to the person doing the quiz. More importantly, different definitions will bring out two very different forms of answers on what personality trait is attractive in a person.
Although I started the quiz for fun, when I got my answer, I was left confused and sceptical. How does picking King Triton as a caring Disney parent or Rachel McAdams as a Canadian celebrity lead me to get this answer? It inevitably lacked in internal validity and was very far from answering what the quiz should have answered. The quiz, like most online quizzes, was really fun to do. But it should only be done for fun.
Quiz Link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/javiermoreno/10-in-looks-and-in-personality#.lywxXJza9
Student ID: 260451503
