by: Tanvi Ambekar
Opinion Editor
Does anyone else remember the personality test craze during the COVID-19 pandemic?? Because I can clearly recall the second I stepped back onto my elementary school campus, all my fifth-grade friends could talk about was what combination of arbitrary letters represented them. Suddenly, BFFs with “incompatible” personality types were acting like complete strangers. I endured two weeks of badgering about my own personality type before I sat down with my best friend and forced her to explain what the epidemic actually entailed.
The explanation that followed felt like verbal alphabet soup for my fifth grade brain, so let me translate it to layman’s terms for you. According to her, the most famous of these tests, dubbed “16 Personalities,” takes your answers to 100 questions and categorizes you into one of 16 personality types, each labeled by four letters. Although I didn’t really understand it, peer pressure won, and I decided to take it.
As expected, the test made no sense, plus half the questions sounded the same anyway. The main issue is that the test likes to ask about unnecessarily theoretical topics, and if someone had gotten three hours of sleep that night, they might have trouble actually reasoning through them (I’m someone).
The only upside to the test — which took 45 minutes, by the way – was that it dubbed me an ENFJ, also known as a Protagonist. Now, this label I can agree with; I am charismatic, ambitious, and a great leader. I have phenomenal social skills and naturally get people to agree with me, mostly because I’m always right. Was learning something I already knew worth my entire lunch break? Definitely not. But honestly, the test was spot-on in almost every characterization – except the part that warned against me possibly having an overinflated ego. How is that possible?
After some research, I learned that the test is based on the theories of Carl Jung, a pretty insignificant philosopher and disciple of borderline psychopath Sigmund Freud. I’m not about to become my English 10 Honors teacher and lecture you about either of their psychological theories, but basically, they both argued that the human psyche consists of three parts: a savage part, an overly moral part, and a part responsible for balancing the two. The test tells you how dominant each portion is and how that forms your unique personality.
Looking back, I wish I could go back and tell fifth-grade Tanvi that this whole thing is a scam anyway. It’s like those BuzzFeed “Which Disney Princesses Are You A Mix Of?” tests – just take the quiz for the dopamine hit and move on with your life. Hey, who knows – maybe if people quit relying on centuries-old psychological theories to tell them the meaning of their lives, they’d finally rely on their own judgment to make a decision for once.