Personality quirks and quizzes

4 April 2014, 1:06 pm by Giggles

According to a personality test I took in a college class, I have the type of personality that hates personality tests. Which to me just proves the point.

I don’t like them because I don’t think people can be broken down into four categories, or however many categories a particular personality test has. I don’t like that several of them ask you to answer as you would have as a child and do not allow for personalities to grow and change, because they do. There are approximately 7 billion people on earth. Find me a personality test with 7 billion categories and maybe I’ll like it. Maybe.

A personality quiz, especially the online entertainment variety, tell us as much about ourselves as knowing your zodiac sign does, which is basically nothing.

So I was interested to read this summary of why online personality quizzes are so popular – Our Obsession With Online Quizzes Comes From Fear, Not Narcissism. It seems humans have a general need to quantify their experience. We need to be able to show others who we are. By finding out you would be the same Disney princess as your friend you are able to bond. We have to declare ourselves, we can’t just be ourselves.

Maybe I’m really comfortable in who I am without declaring it to the world. Or maybe I really do have the personality that hates personality tests, but I still don’t see the draw of these quizzes. I’d rather not be quantified. Thank you very much.

You will, however, find me in Ravenclaw house on Pottermore.

4 shared thoughts about Personality quirks and quizzes

Abbie says:
1 person giggled
4 April 2014 at 2:03 pm

This makes me think of a chapter in Mostly Harmless (the 5th or 6th book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy) where the astrophysicist-turned-news-anchor Tricia McMillan has a conversation with an astrologist about the nature of astrology. Here’s a bit of it:

In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”

Brett says:
Giggle
5 April 2014 at 10:00 am

Which Burger King dollar menu item are YOU? Take this quiz now! :brett:

mama g says:
1 person giggled
15 April 2014 at 3:28 pm

And I’m a Hufflepuff. But that’s the house I wanted to be in so I answered the questions so the hat would place me there. And …. I think you can manipulate most quizzes to do what you want.

AmandaStretch says:
Giggle
8 May 2014 at 8:55 am

Hooray for Ravenclaws! Sometimes I take them for fun, but it’s definitely the people that start living by what they learn from these things to tell them how to live their life that is a problem. Even the Myers-Briggs and tests like it should be taken with some understanding that most people in those categories exist on a spectrum, which I don’t think everyone does.