“Describe yourself in three words”—the simple, yet daunting question glares at me from my laptop screen, challenging me to sort my chaotic identity as a seventeen-year-old into three neat piles. As college applications are drawing nearer and nearer, I find myself desperately seeking to answer the question: Who really am I? Troubled with finding the right words, I turned to the internet…which is where I fell down the deep and all-consuming rabbit hole of “personality quizzes.”
“Which one of the 16 Personalities are you?” “What is your Cosmos Persona?” “What color aura is your music taste?” “What Cake R U?” Etcetera, etcetera. With names as outlandish as these, you would think that I strayed away from these seemingly meaningless assessments. Yet, I found myself engrossed in one after another—INFJ, spacetime, violet, macaron. The more intrigued I became, a sense of confusion also crept up on me. Even after all these answers, I was still lost on how to answer the original probing question.
I was familiar with the Myers-Briggs Personality Typology along with a couple of other adjacent tests succeeding as profiting tools in supposedly creating better workplaces in terms of improving teamwork. This got me curious. Knowing how these companies put a label on you for monetary gain and how idle personality type results usually are, why are we drawn to them? I believe that it’s because of three factors: they are convenient, they are popular, and they give people a sense of personal identity in this digital age of labeling, fad-following, and micro-trends. Could it also be a way of crafting a personal identity that is more easily recognized, so it is easier to market yourself? I believe so.
The more isolated technology drives people to become, both from healthy in-person interactions as well as from self-awareness, the more people turn to online sources to direct their sense of self—even if the source contains little validity.
For example, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been proven to be unreliable as test takers often receive varying results after attempting it repeatedly, with some studies showing this rate to be as high as chance. To explore this more, I ran a survey to find out if there exists a correlation between the two most popular “personality typologies”: MBTI and astrology. Out of 4,322 participants’ responses, I discovered an insignificant p-value of 1.0458605776754964e-09 in terms of correlation between participants’ MBTI types and their astrological sun signs, suggesting that these tests may, in fact, be nonsensical in accurately describing one’s persona.
Running another test for Cramer’s V, an effect size measurement for the chi-square test of independence, or, in other words, how strongly two categorical fields are associated, I found a value of 0.10985550088397879, supporting the p-value in claiming that MBTI and astrological sun signs have weak association.
Furthermore, people should be aware of the potency of Barnum effect (psychological phenomenon whereby people tend to believe that a generic personality description applies specifically to themselves), confirmation bias (people’s tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s prior beliefs), and self-fulfilling prophecy.
All of the aforementioned increase the risk of personality-test-takers falling victim to perceiving their sense of self as one inseparable from and dictated by the internet.
Circling back to the original question, while I might still not be 100% sure what three adjectives best describe me, I do know that I should dig deeper into my introspection and pursue more valuable life experiences in order to find out; they should probably not be “INFJ,” “spacetime,” and “macaron.”
