By: Athena Edwards
I am an unapologetic INFJ. I am a proud Ravenclaw. I am also fairly certain that you know what I am referring to – the labels that we are given by personality quizzes.
Our generation has an unhealthy fixation with personality quizzes. I’m not just talking about the well-known and wide-spread ones, like the Myers-Briggs Personality tests and the ink blot tests. There’s also the short, miniscule ones we take on our own when we are supposed to be doing something else. They can be the ones found on social media, such as Meaww, Nametests and Playbuzz, or the ones backed by our favorite movies, shows, books and musicians. For instance, what is your Hogwarts house? What would you be if you were a dessert?
Do you feel that the result fully represents you as a person? There are things about your personality that a quiz will never be able to grasp. For instance, what is your favorite thing about a freshly mowed lawn? Do you get excited when you enter a Hobby Lobby? Does your behavior change when you are with your friends versus when you’re with your grandparents? These small, seemingly inconsequential things you do play just as much of a role in your personality as what the first thing that comes to your mind does. In fact, the first thing that comes to mind when answering quiz questions all depends on your experiences that day.
Your personality is not as one-dimensional as these quizzes make it out to be.
These quizzes can be excellent in helping you figure out who you are. They can help you figure out how you learn, how you can improve interactions with others and can be great conversation topics. However, we get so caught up in them that they are no longer just used to find ourselves but to define ourselves. I know many people who constantly retake personality quizzes because they do not agree with their result. I also know a few people who will stop doing certain things “because that’s not very Slytherin-like.” This saddens me because there are so many other things that you can do besides stressing about what is normal for your personality or not. We are not a quiz result, academic or otherwise.
