This week’s CBC web column…
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The forecourt of the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi bore the inscription “Know thyself.”
These days, we find out about ourselves the same way we find out about everything else: we go on the Internet.
For example, in recent weeks I’ve learned where I fall on the political compass, which Star Trek character I am, which Hogwarts house I belong to, and various things about my personality that must be well-hidden because I don’t recognize them at all.
And I learned all these things through some of the many—tens of thousands, if not millions—of quizzes available on the web.
I have no idea who put up the first interactive questionnaire on the web, but I suspect it happened fairly early on. And it was probably a teacher, because who thinks in terms of quizzes more than a teacher?
Certainly a lot of the quizzes and questionnaires put online are study guides for courses offered at various schools and universities. Most of these are of interest only to the teachers who post them and the students who take them. But the usefulness of quizzes as a teaching tool for the general public is also recognized through the quizzes posted for general use by educational institutions such as museums.
For example, the Virtual Museum of Canada has an online treasure hunt for students between the ages of 8 to 17, who have to answer questions about exhibits found in 23 virtual museums located across Canada, covering Canadian history, science, technology, art and nature.
The virtual museum in Saskatchewan that’s part of the treasure hunt is the Melfort and District Museum. The Sasktchewan treasure hunt question is: “Which of the following describes harvesting work? 1. Sowing the seeds. 2. Digging and turning the earth over with a tool or plough. 3. Harvesting the grain when it is ripe.”
Note that I didn’t say they were hard questions…
Somewhere along the way, someone started posting online existing questionnaires of the kind people have been taking for decades in high school guidance classes.
So, for example, you can find multiple versions of the venerable Myers-Briggs personality test, first created in 1942, and similar tests. There are whole sites dedicated to this kind of “serious” personality testing. One I ran across is HumanMetrics, which uses the slogan “Try Your Traits Before Trying Fate” and offers everything from the Jung Typology Test (similar to Briggs-Myers) to the Jung Marriage Test, the Small Business Entrepreneur Profiler (to tell you what kind of business you’d be best at running) the Assertiveness Test and the Morals Test.
IQ tests have also made their way online. I’ve taken a couple of them, with wildly varying results which I won’t share. One quick one is at iqtest.com.
Note, however, that many of the sites offer free tests to entice you to take more complex tests for which they charge you. Or they’ll charge you for a more complete assessment, or written report, or something like that. I’m pretty skeptical about IQ and personality tests, so I’d never shell out for them myself.
I prefer free quizzes, and there’s certainly no shortage of those, either.
One famous one that periodically gets quite a bit of attention is the Political Compass. You answer an extensive series of questions about your political ideas and concerns, and it places you on a four-axes compass ranging from left to right (which represents, well, Left to Right), and up and down (representing Libertarian at the bottom and Authoritarian at the top). My results put me dead center of both axes. I’m so boring I literally define middle-of-the road, apparently.
The Political Compass is relatively serious. Most online quizzes aren’t. A typical just-for-fun one would be the one at the Liverpool Museums’ “Beatles Games” site, called, “Which Beatle Are You?” and the first question gives you the flavour: “How are you today? Are you feeling okay?” Possible answers: “I feel fine,” “It’s all too much,” “I feel like death,” “I’m being driven round the bend,” “I’m down” and “…with a little help from my friends.”
For the record, I’m George Harrison.
There are a lot of these “What (fill in the blank) are you?” quizzes. For example, there are various versions of “Which Star Trek character are you?” According to at least one of them, I’m Lieutenant Uhura, which didn’t surprise me in the least, because I’ve always seen myself as a beautiful black woman in a mini-skirt.
A very popular one recently has been “Which Hogwarts house do you belong to?” There are multiple versions of this—everyone seems to be making them—but the one I took is a surprisingly in-depth questionnaire that kind of doubles up a proper personality quiz with a bit of fun. I belong in Ravensclaw, apparently.
Just as there are thousands of quizzes, there are dozens of sites devoted to them. One good place to start is Tickle.com. Their tests are divided into categories: entertainment, style and beauty, career, relationship, mind and body, teens, lifestyle, family, and something called PhD-certified. They also offer a section where you can create your own quiz, perhaps, “Which CBC personality are you?” (I couldn’t actually find one like that, but you could make one if you wanted to).
Highlighted quizzes last time I stopped by Tickle included “How do you stay on the bright side?”, “What moves you?”, “What’s your makeup must-have?”, What’s your true talent?” and my favorite, ““What’s your cat’s true identity?”
You can spend hours and hours taking online quizzes. Do they really help you know yourself? Well, at least if you take enough of them you’ll know you’re the kind of person who spends hours and hours taking online quizzes.
Whether you’ll find that a valuable personality insight or not, I really couldn’t say.
