Let’s get personal: the UX of personality quizzes
In human beings’ eternal quest to understand ourselves better, there is one part of the internet that indulges.
The Internet as a Personality Quiz
On the internet, everything we do is like taking a personality quiz. Every website visit, web search, ‘like’ and click reveals something about us. Except, in this case, we’re not the only ones who see the results. Algorithms are trained to ‘accurately’ infer our personality based on the gathered and correlated data of our actions.
Social media platforms and their algorithms slowly “entomb [a person] as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why,” writes Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing. The more the self is reduced to “a consistent and recognisable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital,” Odell wrote, the easier it is to market to you — whoever that is anymore.
To truly know oneself is a lifelong pursuit and it’s less about the brand of shampoo you buy than your life story, goals for the future, defence mechanisms and coping strategies, hopes and fears and much more. It’s a lot more data for an AI to crunch, and instead of flattening ourselves into a series of ones and zeros, our complexity is something to protect and celebrate.
Putting the ‘ai’ in ‘bias’
Today, personality assessments are being used at an increasing rate in many areas — education, career development and college admissions. And unlike simple personality quizzes on social media, these assessments are used for serious decisions that can determine someone’s life. The world’s most popular personality quiz is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The origins of this test are not grounded in clinical psychology at all. In fact, Katharine Briggs came up with it at her kitchen table as a method to help people live life according to that best version of themselves. Today, the personality testing industry is valued at over $2 Billion, growing at ~15% a year (Guardian). Since the 1960s, more than 50 million people have taken the test, with more than 2 million people taking it every year, increasingly so for job interviews. Its results are found to be “poorly correlated with job performance and embedded with false and dangerous ideas about race, gender and class that drive bias and discrimination (Macabasco).”
The same goes for many AI-based recruitment tools. In 2015, Amazon realised that their algorithm used for hiring employees was found to be biased against women. All because the algorithm was based on resumes submitted over the past decade, and since most of the applicants were men, it was trained to favour men over women.
Data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil says “No technology is inherently harmful; it is just a tool. But just as a sharp knife can be used to cut bread or kill a man, AI could be used to harm individuals or communities….This is particularly true because people often assume that technology is objective and even perfect. If we have blind faith in something deeply complex and profoundly opaque, that is always a mistake.”
What do you see?
a. Lime Scooters
b. Sidewalk
c. Scooters on the sidewalk
All three answers are correct, but for some reason, we have a bias to prefer one of them over the other. And what if you live somewhere where you’ve never seen one of these scooters? You might say ‘modes of transport’. This is also correct. What and how we see is based on our background and upbringing. By programming an AI to ignore other answers to this question, we are excluding people who grew up in a different context.
The Self(ie)
Am I wrong to still love personality quizzes? And why do we love personality quizzes so much? If you thought it’s because we’re obsessed with ourselves, you’re only half right. It’s because human beings crave two things — to be understood and to belong. In typical millennial fashion, we outsource our need to understand ourselves better by taking personality quizzes. We are constantly looking for external validation — whether it’s wanting your boss to praise your work, your friends to tell you you’re cool or your parents to say they are proud of you. But this quest for self-awareness can have dangerous implications when it’s used to make decisions about our lives by ‘someone’ else.
I used to have an unhealthy obsession with magazines when I was a teenager. The centre-fold, pull-out posters used to adorn my walls. Reading my horoscope and taking (the most random) quizzes was the highlight of my day. This obsession shifted its medium to digital with BuzzFeed’s obscure quizzes. I treated them as a form of entertainment, sharing with my friends which character I am most like from Mean Girls or which city I should live in. I think the reason why I am so into personality quizzes is that, on some level, they give me a moment of reflection — summarising myself in precise language — even if it’s based on what I just told it. Understanding why I do or feel certain things during particular situations, allows me to confront (or avoid) parts of myself and also helps me make more informed choices.
Despite the fact that the results can sometimes seem stereotypical or over-simplified, we still find comfort through them. The reason why so many of us relate to the answers has a lot to do with the Barnum Effect- a cognitive bias where people are led to believe any generic positive statement when told that it specifically applies to them, when, in fact, it is as generalist as can be.
Computers exaggerate and codify our love of putting things in boxes. Are you an E or I? Gen X or Gen Z? Do think or feel? Are you a morning or night person? Happy or depressed? AI forces the “systematisation of the unsystematiseable,” reduces depth, flattens experience and us along with it. Personality quizzes are a helpful tool when used for self-discovery, but we can’t allow emerging technology to use that information against us.
Resources & Further Reading:
- The Dark Side of That Personality Quiz That You Just Took — Paul Bisceglio
- Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless — Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell
- TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one — Jess Joho
- The Creepy TikTok Algorithm Doesn’t Know You — Elenor Cummins
