"Fine, I write personality quizzes, I donʼt write about the Great Issues of the Day,” says Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. “But I think itʼs fair to say I am a writer.”
If you ever counted your multiple–choice As, Bs, and Cs in the glossy pages of a magazine like Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, or even American Girl, you might personally appreciate Amy’s work. But by the time Flynn’s novel was published in 2012, the magazine—and thus, the “Cosmo Quiz”—was in decline. Print publications were experiencing huge losses as consumers turned to digital means for their news and entertainment. By 2015, advertising revenue in print newspapers dropped from $60 billion to $20 billion since the year 2000. Gone Girl’s story reflects this shift: Amy loses her job as a result of the Great Recession, and so does her husband Nick, who works in journalism as well.
But the quiz itself, unlike Nick and Amy’s literal psychological thriller of a marriage, has continued to thrive—just in different forms. From Myers–Briggs types to TikTok slideshows, personality assessments are alive and well. Why do we gravitate toward these tests? What keeps us creating and taking them? As Street dives into the cult of personality quizzes, feel free to take as many as you like—and maybe you’ll discover something about yourself, too.
There are generally two species of popular quizzes: those that test our knowledge on a subject, and those that claim to tell us what “type” of something we are. Following (and undoubtedly contributing to) the dwindling of the magazine quiz, one website in particular became the definitive producer of both in the 2010s: Buzzfeed. Ever wonder what famous poem you would be? Or want to test yourself on your knowledge of rom–com trivia? These quizzes are a little hard to take seriously, but they’re not meant to be serious. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, the feedback section, with answers like “OMG” and “LOL,” makes that clear.
The key to Buzzfeed’s success, however, was not the “Quizzes” tab, which is the very first on their website. It was the “Make a Quiz” tab, which is the very last. The site’s invitation for users to construct their own quizzes allows them to join in on the other side of the quiz–making–and–taking process. But, it also created an avenue for Buzzfeed to acquire even more engaging content geared towards consumers because they were created by consumers themselves. One community contributor, “raechilling,” was actually their second highest driver of traffic worldwide through her quizzes, which averaged in numbers between 40 and 50 a week.
Central to the Buzzfeed quiz’s popularity, too, is its appeal to hyper–specific niches. Search for your favorite TV show, movie, or band, and you’ll undoubtedly find a quiz that caters to that interest. As one user commented on Buzzfeed’s quiz “Decorate A Tiny Apartment To Find Out Which Radiohead Album You Need To Hear,” “These quizzes get more and more specifically weird as time goes on.”
The Buzzfeed quiz is silly and shallow, but that’s part of its charm. It’s self–aware. When you take one, there’s a fundamental understanding that the results from a set of six questions asking for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner preferences don’t really tell you much about yourself—other than what K-pop group you should stan, maybe.
Although Buzzfeed is past its prime, its spirit lives on. It seems there’s always some newfangled quiz trending online, especially on TikTok. In 2021, an aesthetic South Korean personality test that assigns users a “personal color” went viral. The year after, a website called “Charactour” was popular for its test assigning TV or movie characters, with a vault containing over 5,000 of them, to users’ personalities. More recently, a job search and recruitment platform based in Taiwan had people flocking to take its test, which claims to help users discover their work style. The quiz, called “Which Cake R U?”, also assigns quiz–takers a dessert (appropriate, given the company’s name is CakeResume).
TikTok, too, contains its own form of personality quizzes, though they’re not formatted very traditionally. Instead of a set of questions and answers, these videos ask one question—some variant of “which one are you?”—and then present a series of options. One video, for example, with 2.9 million likes, tells viewers to “ask your friends which hour you are!”, and then presents a high–speed collection of aesthetically–pleasing pictures of skies and landscapes. These videos thrive on TikTok in great numbers, where they can provide categories as specific as which flower or Sonny Angel one might be, and as broad as a “vibe you give off.” With the 2023 addition of TikTok’s slideshow feature, called “photo mode,” these quizzes became even easier for creators to construct, and viewers to experience at their own pace. The most entertaining versions of these quizzes might be the parodies, which still boast comment sections full of users tagging their friends. Ever wonder which felony you would be?
But not all personality quizzes are this unserious. Some claim a more real role as methods of self–discovery, even a sort of self–diagnosis. This is where we see a change of language, from the personality “quiz” to the personality “test.” The four temperaments test stems from a proto–psychological theory originally proposed in ancient Greece by Hippocrates, a physician who thought that bodily fluids affected personality. The enneagram personality test sorts people into nine numbered categories. The first formal personality tests were used during World War I to predict whether soldiers would go on to suffer from “shell shock.” Now, they claim to predict every facet of our inner lives, from our behavioral tendencies to our deepest hopes and fears.
Undoubtedly the most famous personality assessment is the Myers–Briggs. If you’ve ever taken a personality test, it’s probably this one. The test, which Katharine Briggs developed with her daughter, assigns a person four letters that represent four sets of dual personality traits, making for sixteen “types” in total. You can be classified as an introvert or extrovert (I or E), sensing or intuitive (S or I), thinking or feeling (T or F), and judging or perceiving (J or P). According to the official Myers–Briggs Company website, Briggs was originally inspired by her observations of how her daughter and her fiancé had substantially different “way[s] of seeing the world.”
But Myers–Briggs, and the personality test in general, does not come without controversy. Some claim that the use of these tests by employers can be discriminatory. Research has shown that the use of personality tests in job screenings clashes with scientific evidence, and the bimodality of distinctions like extrovert versus introvert doesn’t align with scientific data. The fact that answering one set of questions about oneself once should give you an answer is also problematic. Depending on one’s mood, one might be considered an “ENTP” one day and an “ISTJ” the next. If you’ve taken an introductory psychology class, you’ve probably heard firsthand from a professor that these assessments are pseudoscience at best. Can the Myers–Briggs test, or any personality assessment, really say anything definitive about who we are?
Despite all these objections, both scientific and ethical, many would still say yes. Employers continue to require assessments like the Myers–Briggs to identify job applicants’ and current employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Schools often give students personality tests to help them choose what career paths might be right for them. Reddit’s r/MBTI is thriving, with over 508,000 members who share memes, ask for advice, and discuss their perspectives on their own and others’ types. It’s estimated that 50 million people have taken the test. Why do we still put stock in these assessments, which, according to some, are as scientific as any quiz you find on Buzzfeed?
Ultimately, we keep taking the Myers–Briggs test for the same three reasons we keep swiping through TikTok carousels to find out which highly–poeticized planet we are. First, we like personality quizzes because we want to understand other people better. The same psychology behind the urge to stereotype encourages us to make conclusions about other people quickly, and a glimpse into their identity via personality tests seems promising. Like any form of stereotyping, this is just as subject to error and rushed assumptions. Second, we want to feel a sense of belonging to a group we perceive as similar to us. It’s for this reason that communities surrounding personality types are so popular; there’s a subreddit for each MBTI type, and the most popular, r/INFP, has more than 229,000 members, almost half the number of members in r/MBTI.
Finally, and most importantly, we love personality quizzes because we want to know more about ourselves. We wish we could experience a real–life Sorting Hat from Harry Potter that explicitly categorizes us based on our intrinsic strengths and weaknesses, but we have to settle for the online quiz. The accumulation of hyper–specific identities is tempting because we want to be more aware of our own characteristics, as well as how other people see us—hence the “ask your friends” TikTok videos. It’s the same reason why astrology is so popular, especially among young people who are still figuring it all out.
As much as we decry labels, it’s natural to want them. If “know thyself” is an unconscious drive behind every human being—and more than that, a mandate—maybe we should be a little more tolerant of that silly quiz about what sweet treat you are. All I’ll say is I’m an INTJ, and I got the layer cake.
