Have you ever clicked on a link like “What does your favorite animal say about you?” wondering what your love of hedgehogs reveals about your psyche? Or filled out a personality assessment to gain new understanding into whether you’re an introverted or extroverted “type”? People love turning to these kinds of personality quizzes and tests on the hunt for deep insights into themselves. People tend to believe they have a “true” and revealing self hidden somewhere deep within, so it’s natural that assessments claiming to unveil it will be appealing.
As psychologists, we noticed something striking about assessments that claim to uncover people’s “true type.” Many of the questions are poorly constructed – their wording can be ambiguous and they often contain forced choices between options that are not opposites. This can be true of BuzzFeed-type quizzes as well as more seemingly sober assessments.
On the other hand, assessments created by trained personality psychologists use questions that are more straightforward to interpret. The most notable example is probably the well-respected Big Five Inventory. Rather than sorting people into “types,” it scores people on the established psychological dimensions of openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. This simplicity is by design; psychology researchers know that the more respondents struggle to understand the question, the worse the question is.
But the lack of rigor in “type” assessments turns out to be a feature, not a bug, for the general public. What makes tests less valid can ironically make them more interesting. Since most people aren’t trained to think about psychology in a scientifically rigorous way, it stands to reason they also won’t be great at evaluating those assessments. We recently conducted series of studies to investigate how consumers view these tests. When people try to answer these harder questions, do they think to themselves “This question is poorly written”? Or instead do they focus on its difficulty and think “This question’s deep”? Our results suggest that a desire for deep insight can lead to deep confusion.
When we receive information in other people’s presence, are we sensitive to what they are able and unable to understand? Two studies suggest that we are, but only when we have cognitive resources available. In two experiments, participants saw sentences preceded by a context; the participants were alone or in the presence of a confederate who had no access to the context. The information was plausible (e.g., “the bird had a little beak and yellow tail”), implausible (e.g., “the girl had a beak and a yellow tail”), or plausible given the context (e.g., “the girl had a little beak and a yellow tail,” preceded by “the girl dressed up as a canary for Halloween”). Participants had to decide whether the sentences made sense (i.e., were plausible) while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded. Participants evaluated the context-dependent sentences as more implausible and showed more difficulty processing them (as measured by the EEG) only when the confederate was present. This effect did not occur when participants simply had to read the information or when they had to answer demanding comprehension questions. Thus, unless mental resources are limited, individuals seem able to track the perspectives of anyone present during a conversation, which is important for communicating and forming relationships.
