Why (personality) quizzes suck

 

 

Which Hogwarts house are you in? What does your fashion sense say about you? What is your learning style?

 From the Internet to magazines to even work set by teachers/lecturers, personality quizzes are everywhere. Poisoning the world with their (not so) hidden agenda of wanting to sort everyone into some sort of label, category, or box. When did this need to follow an overdressed flowchart only to be told exactly who you are by a random stranger become a thing? It doesn’t even make sense, surely if you wanted to know if you were an optimistic person (and you seriously couldn’t figure it out yourself) you’d ask a friend or someone who actually knows you?

 Considering that the personality quizzes are, at their core, complete rubbish it does make sense that their questions and “multi-choice” answers are ridiculous as well.  

 Some are so simple to work out that it’s a waste of time. Nine times out of ten your more likely to pick the answer that corresponds with the result that you want rather than the true answer, so you might as well do something slightly more productive with your time than finding out what your spirit animal is.

At the other end of the spectrum of course are those quizzes with such vague or restrictive answers and questions that they’re almost impossible to answer properly.

I suppose these things wouldn’t bother me so much if the quizzes I had taken had actually come out with a single definite answer. Instead I got “multimodal learning preference” or “due to marginal or no preference of thinking over feeling and sensing over intuition you have more than one personality type.”

Which meant that all but visual learning apparently works for me. I disagree. I am not an aural learner for the simple fact that if I’m listening (just listening and nothing else) to someone speak for longer than seven minutes it never fails to make my brain shut down and leave me struggling to stay awake.  How is that helping me to learn? It also means that, according to the quiz, I have more personalities than Jekyll and Hyde with not one or two personality types but four…

Personality quizzes just aren’t realistic. They’re restrictive and they suck.

 

 

 

 

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