Online personality tests claiming to define the ‘color’ of your personality, your animal type, the Harry Potter, Disney, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Cartoon character that best represents you are rife on the Internet. Gone are the days when your personality profile could be evaluated only by a trained psychoanalyst. These days, you can define yourself and everyone else with the right web site and a few clicks of the mouse.

Personality Tests Past and Present
Whatever happened to the ‘serious’ personality tests? An online search for ‘serious personality tests’ reveals top results boldly offering non-serious personality tests. Ah well. A revised search on Myers-Briggs (woo wooh, we said that in hushed tones twenty years ago) returns several serious Myers-Briggs sites (including one offering your personality ‘formula’) and the ‘Keirsey Temperament Sorter’ system. There are a couple of sites offering tests based on Jung’s typology (very serious), but none of them sound nearly as interesting as tests defining your personality color, animal, or Harry Potter or Star Wars character.

Interpreting Personality Profiles
There’s another issue with both serious and non-serious personality tests. What do they all mean? Truly, it doesn’t help me to know that my Harry Potter character is Professor Snape, or that I have an orange personality type. I seem to recall that Myers-Briggs labeled me an ‘INTP’, but I have no clue if that means I’m friendly, more concerned with things than people, interested in systems, or a loner. It would be pretty sad if I needed a personality test to find out, but I’m sure you get the idea. This is where the EQ SQ tests come in. I really LIKE the fact that the names of the tests actually mean something. Probably because I am more of a systemizer than an empathizer.

The Future of Personality tests
I think ‘character’ personality tests are here to stay. We can only expect more creative variations. In fact, I’ve thought of a new one. What kind of fruit or vegetable are you? Let’s consider Angelina Jolie? A lime, maybe? Not as common as a lemon, but just as colorful and with the same tart nature (ahem).

Please tell me that this personality test does not exist already.

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About the author

Katrina Boydon is a systemizing female with empathizing traits. She is as likely to be found crying over a sad film as balancing her bank account to the last cent.