beetiger

It's bizarre, the Internet quiz-building and quiz taking phenomenon. It's not an Internet phenomenon exclusively; such things have been popular in women's magazines for years. But I seem to get alerted to a new one every day lately. I feel compelled to take most of them.

"How old do you act?"
"Which Harry Potter character are you?"
"What's your sexual MO?"
"Which big cat are you?"
"How gay are you?"

These tests are built of somewhat random questions, combined with very straightforward correlations, which then dump you into a limited number of categories. They're built by random anonymous people, whose insight we have no particular reason to trust. But a lot of people, including me, seem to enjoy them. Why?

Call me a deconstructionist.

Part of it is an exploration of our cultural shorthand. Everyone "knows" what a jaguar is like, so describing someone that way tells a lot about that person in very few words. People love to share their test results with each other, as a very shallow form of self-revelation, perhaps, or as a safe way of connecting with others. Sometimes, I like to take the tests backwards, pick the answers that I think will elicit a certain result, so that I can get into the mind of the test-builder. Which of these answers is most likely to tell me that my flavor is "vanilla" rather than "radioactive waste?" This kind of armchair sociology pleases me.

I am trying to consider what I want to do with myself after my layoff in September, so I've also taken some more 'serious' diagnostic tests, such as the Strong Inventory, MAPP, and Myers-Briggs. The questions are more directly relevant, the correlations built by serious research rather than by stereotype and whim. But the feeling of taking them is rather similar.

"Tell me about myself." It's the lazy route to self-analysis, the route that says that someone else can tell me who I am, where I fit, what people see in me, why I act the way I do, what's going to make me happy. Anyone, even if you've never met me. Please save the pain of figuring my heart out alone. Tell me where I belong.

No one really likes to be stereotyped, in the sense that we don't want someone telling us how we must act to be who we say we are. But there's also something very comforting about categorization. Humans like patterns. We like to see things fit together. Horoscopes and personality tests say very general things, and we bend them to match us, bend our self-concept to match them. It makes us feel like we understand something. And when life is messy and confusing, sometimes it's nice to know that of the Fab Four, you are most like Ringo.