Why Personality Quizzes are Inherently Evil

We’ve all been there. You’re bored, procrastinating, or trying to get our mind off of something (or someone), and you don’t feel like watching Netflix for some strange reason. So, naturally, you head on down to Buzzfeed. The articles require reading, Tasty requires getting up and making food, and you’ve already seen all of the videos, so you go to the personality quiz section.

Personality quizzes have been around for a long time. Ranging from ones that tell you what career suits you best to ones that tell you what type of lamp you are, they all do the same thing. They ask you seemingly random questions about colours, song preferences, or opinions on classic sitcoms, and then they tell you something completely unrelated about yourself. But could it be that these seemingly harmless forms of entertainment are taking away from who we are as human beings?

The first trick in these quizzes are the overgeneralizations that ensure success most times. When doing these quizzes, most people will bend the truth in order to be told that they are what they want to be. Instead of putting that their favourite animal is a bunny, they’ll say that it’s a wolf in order to be told that their persona is red instead of purple. They’ll say that their favourite drink is water in order to be told that they’re secretly a health guru. They’ll say that they only watch 3 hours of Netflix a week so that they seem productive, giving them more favourable results. And even when people don’t bias their results, the quizzes are set up in a way that most people will be able to relate to different aspects of every answer. One could expect the poptart quizzes to be sugar coated, but it doesn’t take much to see that every single quiz is like this. They’re designed to people-please.

Now, people don’t just do one quiz. No sir. That would be like eating just one potato chip. Once the quiz that you’ve completed is different, you see the links to all sorts of similar quizzes. These are strategically put there in order to grab your attention. We all know that we’re being tricked into doing more of these quizzes. We aren’t ignorant to that fact. And yet we choose to be manipulated into doing just one more personality quiz. The amount of time that we can spend on these is ridiculous. If it was just one personality quiz a week, maybe it wouldn’t be such an issue. But when it’s two hours later and your homework is still sitting untouched on your desk, evidently, there’s an issue. These quizzes are time consuming, and what for? What good comes out of knowing what type of dorito matches your soul?

Ultimately, the biggest issue with these quizzes are that they replace soul searching. We turn to the internet to tell us who we are instead of finding out who we are for ourselves. Who is Buzzfeed to tell you that you’re more of a Ross than a Chandler? Or that you’re more of a Cinderella than a Nemo? Or that you’re more of a mug than a cup? As a society, we have to overcome this. We need to revolt against being put in these boxes by a quiz online. So next time you want to do one of these quizzes, stand up against the system. Find out what type of coffee table you are by yourself.