Personality Tests

Yeah, I was “surfing” the net earlier today, or doing whatever it is you call clicking random meaningless sites when you’ve got nothing else to do. Naturally, being that I am not the sort of person who would do anything rational and/or sensible, I decided to take a personality test.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to copy and paste the results on here, primarily because I found them to be absolutely useless in every sense of the word, so sorry if you were looking to find out what personality type I am. Seriously though, what is it with the personality test rage? Here, let’s have a basic example of what you find on every personality test:

Question 1: Do you find yourself nervous in social circumstances?

Answer: Yes

What this means: You’re shy.

Just repeat similar gibberish for the duration of the test and you’re supposed to have a P.H.D certified analysis of your personality. I’m not really complaining that the tests aren’t accurate, but, rather, they’re not telling you anything that you don’t already know.

As far as I can tell, the idea of the tests is to somehow add insight into your personality that you don’t currently have, correct? Well, there’s no way that the tests can really do this, since you’re the one answering the bloody questions to begin with. So, if you’re really shy, but in self-denial, well, you’re going to answer the questions indicating that you’re not shy wholly fooling the advanced artificial intelligence, and, in the process, rendering the test completely useless.

So, basically, the only argument these tests have going for them is that they aren’t meant to be taken seriously, anyway. Now, I could accept this if the test was “What dog breed are you?” or whatever, but when the test advertises that it’s “P.H.D. certified” they’re obviously trying to mislead the public into thinking they’re getting a real psychological personality analysis, when in fact they’re being fed hogwash while the test provider hopes they’ll click one of their adds for Viagra.

So, yeah, personality tests are stupid.