Quiz. The four-letter word alone is enough to fill a classroom with panic. But flash “quiz” across the screen anytime I’m on the Internet, and my eyes light up.
Now you’re probably thinking, this girl is cray. And maybe I am a little bit, but before you start with the name-calling, let’s look at some numbers.
Judging by more than 18 million views since Jan. 16, I’m not the only person who has ever pondered Buzzfeed’s pressing question: “What city should I actually live in?”
If you haven’t taken the BuzzFeed quiz yourself, you’ve probably at least seen or heard about it. And although personality quizzes are no new form of entertainment, it seems they’ve been extra popular lately.
Even The New York Times piece that received the most traffic last year was a quiz. “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” an interactive quiz about dialects, made No. 1 on the list of the publication’s most-visited stories after being published about two weeks before the end of 2013.
All too often, we hear about the media changing. And seeing a quiz rise to the top as the most-seen story of one of the most popular papers is a perfect example. Audiences are leaning toward more-interactive consumption of news, and quizzes offer publications another way to provide that for readers, along with a little fun.
But what is it about personality quizzes that makes them so hard to resist? It’s not as if choosing a Starbucks drink will accurately tell you how big your penis is. By the way, according to BuzzFeed, mine is huge. Choosing a favorite drink won’t accurately determine the NBA team you should be cheering for, yet our news feeds are littered with quiz results and reactions.
Those who have speculated about the reasons behind the popularity of personality quizzes have offered curiosity as an explanation, hence the reason I took the penis-size quiz.
But in all seriousness, sometimes you just have to know. I remember taking the dialects quiz the morning it was published because after seeing so many posts about accurate results, I had to know if the Internet could determine where I was from based on a few choice phrases.
One of the more interesting explanations I found was Jordan Shapiro’s. He cited the psychological function of displacement as a reason for the continuous popularity of answering a few silly questions about favorites in hopes of determining things like, say, a dwelling place.
According to Shapiro’s piece in Forbes about the virality of personality test, “displacement ... is an unconscious process through which the psyche transfers energy, ideas, and emotions away from things that cause anxiety, and toward similar things that are superficial, whimsical, and distracting.”
Maybe that means the anxiety you get from not knowing what you’re going to do after you graduate college will incline you to wonder which one of Jon Hamm’s massive bulges you are? I’m not sure. It’s probably different for all of us.
But right before I navigate toward an Internet quiz, I’m usually thinking, “I’m not understanding this macroeconomics question. Maybe I should find out which Pixar movie I am.” That way I am ridding myself of anxiety while deciding between hypothetical creme brulee and doughnuts. And maybe that can work for you, too.
[Marjorie Nunez is a UF journalism senior. Her columns appear on Fridays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 1/24/2014 under the headline "Online quizzes often reveal personal truths"]
