Why is everyone getting Portland? And why did I get London?

My Facebook news feed has been filled this past week with friends reporting their results on Buzzfeed’s What City Should You Actually Live In? quiz.

It seemed like everyone I knew was getting Portland. I got London. And I saw several people say things like “Even though I changed my Beyonce, I still got Barcelona.” This all led me to wonder how the quiz was scored.

As it turns out, each of the nine response options for each question corresponds to one of nine possible result cities (e.g., apparently they drink Espresso, Double Shots most in Rio). To determine the “city you should actually live in”, Buzzfeed finds the mode of your responses in terms of their correspondence with the nine possible result cities. Ties are broken in favor of the result city that appears later in the list of possibilities as they’re given in the quiz code (e.g., a tie for most endorsed between Portland and Cape Town means you get Cape Town). The list below is in the order the cities are listed in the quiz page code. (Aside: Buzzfeed calls this a “personality” type quiz, and the above can be generalized to describe how they score such quizzes.)

See below for how the response options correspond to locations. Not so sure about the face validity of this quiz. :-)

Rio

New York

Los Angeles

London

Paris

Barcelona

Tokyo

Portland

Cape Town