Tell Me My Story: From Myers-Briggs to Buzzfeed
Personality tests and quizzes offer insight, emotional validation and a socially acceptable way to talk about ourselves and connect with others.
Key Points
1. Personality tests and quizzes give us a moment of reflection and validation in an overwhelming world.
2. When descriptions resonate, they hit the "you get me" jackpot, triggering neural rewards.
3. Personality labels become characters in our inner stories, with glimpses of our strengths and possibilities.
Why We’re Drawn to Personality Frameworks
From the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram to the “Golden Retriever Energy” Tik Tok Trend, there is no shortage of ways to measure and think about personality. In the vast spectrum of personality tests, some are administered by professionals, but many are pop culture-inspired quizzes on the Internet. What they all have in common, however, is the ability to “measure” or type our personality, gain insights into our behavior, and give us a story to tell about our favorite subject: Ourselves.
Even the most frivolous BuzzFeed quiz taps into something deeper: our desire to be known, to find clarity in chaos, and to share something meaningful about ourselves to further our sense of connection and belonging. Finding out our “type” paints a picture in our minds of who we are and how we interact with the world. Even a Disney Princess can give us a moment of pause and introspection. As we think about her core characteristics, we can’t help but compare them to our own. Even if fleeting, we have a moment of “why Arial and not Moana?” Introspection increases self-awareness—central of identifying personal values and strengths (Carden et al., 2022).
A Short History of the Longing to Be Understood
The human desire to define personality dates back through recorded history. The ancient Greeks developed a system based on four humors to explain how temperament was linked to a specific bodily fluid, guiding moral and medical decisions.
There were earlier practices and parallel frameworks. Traditional Chinese Medicine linked temperament to the five elements. Ayurvedic practitioners created three doshas to explain not just personality but physical constitution. These were not philosophical exercises. These systems were created as practical tools for understanding human behavior and health.
By the 20th century, personality theories had evolved mostly, but not entirely, away from the ancient wisdoms, as evidenced by the current wellness culture. But an emerging interest in the potential for scientific methods to study human behavior, such as consciousness and reaction times, in the late 19th and early 20th century inspired new theoretical models to assess traits with increasing levels of scientific rigor. Conceptualizations of personality evolved from Freudian drives and Jungian archetypes through Eysenck and Cattell’s factor analysis of personality traits to the Big Five framework. The Big Five framework (also known as OCEAN) is the gold standard in psychological research, due to its demonstrated scientific validity in multiple contexts and cultures.
One of the arguably most well-known measures, the Myers-Briggs, was not created by psychologists, but by a mother-daughter duo inspired by Jung. Focusing on psychological preferences, it brought personality typing to the mainstream due to its accessibility and relatability. It remains arguably one of the best-known personality instruments in team building and career counseling, despite its lack of scientific rigor. Its popularity coincided with the rise of management consultants and the interest in self-discovery of the 1970s and 1980s. Today, whether it’s DISC profiles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) at work or “Which Taylor Swift Era are You?” on Instagram, personality typing is everywhere.
Why Are Personality Quizzes So Popular?
There are several reasons why personality quizzes continue to appeal.
1. They Feel Good. We want to find something that speaks to us. Self-image is complicated, a jumble of selves from our worst to our ideal. We are always looking for ways to move the needle toward our best selves. When a personality description resonates, offers insight or gives hope, it activates the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to self-relevance and reward (Tamir & Mitchell, 2012). This self-referential processing feels good—it’s like hitting the “you get me” jackpot.
2. They Streamline Information. Personality tests satisfy our need for cognitive simplicity. They are heuristics that facilitate our understanding. We humans are cognitive misers and we rely on mental shortcuts to make sense of the world (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011). Labels like INFJ or Enneagram 8 offer a tidy way to organize messy personal data. They are like mental file folders for organizing social and emotional life.
3. They Create a Social Shorthand. Personality tests and quizzes give names to behaviors or feelings, making them easy to describe and, more importantly, to share. Labels are metaphors for a large amount of information. When you say “I’m a Type 2 wing 1,” “I’m high in Openness,” or even “I’m a Moana,” you are revealing something meaningful, but without risking the vulnerability of true disclosure.
4. They Offer Hope Disguised as Insight. Every personality test result contains an implicit explanation that relieves self-esteem anxiety and restores ego-consonance. You're not broken; you're a type. Got social anxiety? You're "just an introvert." Struggle with boundaries? You're "a natural helper." Personality labels enable us to reframe our self-criticism, transforming perceived flaws into strengths. This makes us feel better, which, in turn, can inspire us to be more confident and take more positive actions.
Storytelling as Self-Discovery
Narrative identity theory says we make sense of who we are by telling stories about ourselves that connect our past, present, and future (McAdams, 2001). Personality frameworks help us tell our own stories. Sometimes we retell the same stories. But we also continually rewrite them when new experiences and understandings give us new perspectives on what we believed in the past. Insights about ourselves can help us reframe past events, help us challenge negative beliefs, and expand our sense of self.
Personality labels add to our inner narrative, creating roles in our personal mythologies: The Helper, The Explorer, or The Introvert. Every role offers a glimpse of our strengths and possibilities, combining insight to spark hope that helps us understand our past struggles and current behaviors in ways that support our future aspirations.
Personality quizzes surge in popularity during times of uncertainty and change. During crises, people crave coherence and control—something that makes us feel anchored and safe. Typologies help us write a plot line that connects the dots.
Curated Self-Expression and Viral Disclosure
We love to talk about ourselves. Self-disclosure activates the same reward systems in the brain as food or money (Tamir & Mitchell, 2012). Personality tests are a socially acceptable way to do that. This desire is evident in the rising popularity of the Quantified Self movement that uses technology to track and analyze personal data to improve health, well-being, and self-knowledge. Wearables and wellness apps turn personality, mood, and behavior into metrics. Data, like sleep scores or chronotypes, is increasingly being interpreted to infer personality (Krizan et al., 2021; Li et al., 2024). With Apple Watches and Oura rings and AI-generated trait maps using natural language processing, self-exploration is increasingly measurable, visual, and shareable.
Social media has made self-exploration public and viral, a kind of social performance. People share quiz results, Enneagram memes, or astrology charts to connect with others and signal identity. It’s both fun and affirming, a public display of private truths, connecting us without making it too vulnerable.
Meanwhile, commercial concerns aren’t blind to our desire for self-knowledge. Streaming services create personality profiles and taste preferences inferring personality traits based on customer use patterns. Psychology Junkie recently posted "The Best 2025 TV Shows to Stream for Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type," matching shows to types, such as Severance for INTJs to Stranger Things for ENTPs. Dating apps feed user information into personality matching algorithms to improve compatibility.
Meaning Over Accuracy
Where some personality quizzes are clearly nonscientific (e.g. Disney princesses), there is debate as to the scientific validity of some popular typologies. Personality psychologists, for example, have challenged the reliability of the MBTI and Enneagram for years. But psychological accuracy isn’t the measure of value I’m talking about here.
Personality systems endure because they offer a symbolic structure that helps us feel seen, gives us a starting point for reflection, and acts as a mirror to our inner lives. Even when they’re not even remotely scientific, they are useful in meaning-making and social connection.
It’s Not About Being Labeled, It’s About Being Understood
Personality quizzes can be fun and silly, but also useful. They help people identify patterns, express themselves, find belonging and connect with others in a shared language—even if it’s to share a joke. Whether in therapy or on social media, personality frameworks provide a way to think about identity in a fragmented world. They help us feel knowable.
References
Carden, J., Jones, R. J., & Passmore, J. (2022). Defining self-awareness in the context of adult development: A systematic literature review. Journal of Management Education, 46(1), 140–177. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562921990065
Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic decision making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 451–482. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346
Krizan, Z., Hisler, G., Krueger, R. F., & McGue, M. (2021). Why is personality tied to sleep quality? A biometric analysis of twins. Journal of Research in Personality, 90, 104048. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2020.104048
Li, H., Xu, B., Sun, Z. et al. (2024) The role of comfort, personality, and intention in smartwatch usage during sleep. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 705. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03214-y
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. PNAS, 109(21), 8038–8043. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1202129109