"What Kind Of Pasta Are You Most Like?" "Which Era Of Music Matches Your Personality The Most?" "Choose A Dog, And We'll Tell You Your Age." While some actually take online quiz results to heart, as if your personality being most like penne pasta is of importance, most people chalk these quizzes up to nothing more than a link you clicked in the waiting room of a dentist's office.
Buzzfeed quizzes and personality tests, in general, are fun, and being told that you possess a number of redeeming qualities by a computer-generated website is great to hear, but in actuality, these fun online questionnaires can reveal a lot more than you think.
Self-assessments, also known as evaluations of one's actions and attitudes, such as Enneagram, Buzzfeed personality quizzes, and the MBTI, have been popular for decades, evolving into different forms.
Some view these subjective tests as accurate, but others as suggesting traits one wants to be a part of their personality. While self-assessments may not reveal your "true" self, they do to a certain extent serve as a source of knowledge about one's personality.
So, no, the Buzzfeed quiz about which "Friends" character you are is not 100% foolproof, but it does allude to how you view yourself, which is just as important, if not more.
From "determining" which type of person you are (the MBTI personality test), to weighing your viewpoints (Enneagram), self-assessments repeatedly attempt to box people in as a specific kind of person. While it is true that some people may be extroverted or introverted, the reality is that people are made of more than one "thing."
How many times have you looked at your self-assessment and been baffled as to how it reached that conclusion? How many times have you re-taken a personality test and garnered a completely different result? This is because self-assessments fail to tell you the ultimate truth about you, instead, telling how YOU view you.
Life causes changes in personality, and while self-assessments may not be able to accurately determine this, they can give you insight into who you are in the present moment.
It's been said that one's own perception of themselves can be entirely different than what others see. This, in many cases, is accurate. Our own unattractive traits and unhealthy habits may go unnoticed in our mind's eye, because after all, who wants to dwell on all the negative? However, it is also true that our own inner thoughts and feelings play a role in our whole personality and a role in self-assessments. Even the Buzzfeed quizzes about pasta and "Friends."
Self-assessments, in the end, are useful for two reasons: they inspire the test-taker to think critically about one's own personality, and they help the test-taker reflect on how others view them.
Ultimately, they provide insight into one's own goals and life itself, thereby stimulating the desire to continually better oneself. Self-assessments are not the end-all, be-all in representing who we are, but they do offer a unique way to see how our own actions, beliefs, personal choices, and perceptions play a role in our life. Yes, even quizzes about dogs.
