My freshman year I worked the night shift at the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library which — turns out — is the ideal setup for wasting hours taking online personality quizzes. Although past its prime, the tail end of the personality test hype lingers today. Most of us have taken tests that range from the Myers-Briggs to Buzzfeed’s “Which Harry Potter Character Are You?” and just last night I was moved to find my inner potato (it’s a sweet potato, by the way). But what is the hype all about?

Though I have spent countless hours taking tests of that sort and arguably more hours analyzing the meaning behind INFP than the texts for my English classes, part of me has always disliked personality tests because of their tendency to put people in boxes. In the case of the Myers-Briggs, for example, a person is dissected into four personality traits and assigned one of 16 possible outcomes. What I find bothersome is the very fact that there are infinite kinds of people and one person alone can be dissected into multitudes of personality facets. The Myers-Briggs then, like many other tests, lumps the complexity of a human being into one of six combinations, reducing — in my opinion — the human existence.

This prolonged and hypocritical relationship with the mainstream had kept me from exploring the reasons behind the popularity of personality tests, until I began writing this column and realized I did not have a good reason to bash them other than what I have already stated. But I realized I did have one in support of them.

When we take a personality test we may be wanting to be entertained and waste time, but more subtly we want an outside source to tell us who we are. Not necessarily because we don’t know who we are — though that might very well be the case — but because we desire external understanding and validation. We are in search of identity – yes – but it’s not enough for us to find it ourselves. We want external confirmation; we want someone else to understand us and share in who we are.

Stephen Meyers, psychology professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago told the Huffington Post that “people are always looking for venues for self-awareness,” adding that introspection has its limits, while self-assessments act as “mirror(s) inward.” Our attraction to personality tests comes from the same place as the satisfaction we feel hearing a friend say, “That’s so you,” or our excitement after someone recommends a song that perfectly matches our taste. Point is, we wish to be known so well we can be told who we are, even if we already know.

Though taking a personality test is not as satisfying as being understood by another human being, it is an easy way to get a similar feeling from something that’s designed to “take interest” in us. My question then is, why the hype now? Do the majority of people feel the need to be understood more so than they have in the past? Judging from my experience, I don’t think people consciously use personality tests to make up for the lack of genuine interest from others. Few of us take the results to heart for longer than a few minutes, considering most of these quizzes are little more than click bait. However, there is something to be said for the feeling of being understood I experienced when Buzzfeed categorized me as a Ginny Weasley, which I had not felt around another human being in a while.

Letizia Mariani can be reached at mari8259@stthomas.edu.