"Which Sex and the City Character Are YOU?"

On Personality Quizzes, Loneliness, and Belonging

Over the last few weeks, I’ve started writing personality quizzes for work—a job that’s simultaneously very fun and…kind of embarrassing. (But also, 16-year-old Quizilla-obsessed me would be delighted.) This week, I’ve spent a shameful amount of time laboring over a quiz on Sex and the City. I’m almost certainly putting more thought into it than my supervisor wants me to (what if someone who’s a total Samantha gets “Miranda” as their result? I’d be humiliated) but I’m admittedly excited to find out which character I am, according to the quiz that I am writing myself, based on how well I know—or think I know—these characters.

While I don’t actually think making this quiz as reliable and realistic as possible is that high-stakes, I do think it’s true that some users—probably a fair amount—will disagree with their results, already having a solid idea of which character they really are. But if that’s the case, I couldn’t help but wonder: why take the quiz at all?

Me, writing my little wikiHow articles

I think it follows the logic of personality psychologist Simine Vazire, who posits that while we might take personality quizzes to learn more about ourselves, they can rarely tell us more about ourselves than we already know. I’d go even further here and say that we don’t just take personality quizzes to learn more about ourselves; we take them to confirm the assumptions we already have about ourselves. If I think I’m half Charlotte and half Carrie, and my test results say I’m a total Samantha—well, I’ll actually be a little flattered, but mostly I’ll think that whoever made this test (me) did it wrong. 

The idea that we might erroneously look to quizzes to tell us more about ourselves than we already know reminds me of our assumption that our dreams can reveal more than is already somewhere in our heads: that they can predict the future, or that we can talk to one another in them, or see dead loved ones. According to most psychologists, dreams are just vessels where we store random memories. We might rediscover things or find out we’re still processing difficult emotions—but in all, the things we see in dreams are, apparently, nothing more than what’s already in our brains. 

I could write a similar paragraph about tarot cards, astrology, palmistry…. For the record, I, personally, am not a staunch cynic (that’s right, I’m not a Miranda). I believe dreams and tarot and astrology and laundry and flowers and bumping into strangers can all be metaphysically meaningful. 

But regardless, beyond any pseudoscientific properties, I think there are other benefits to personality tests and any other tool we use to reveal truths about us, our lives, our futures, and our purposes. Even if they don’t tell us something new about who we are, they often remind us of things we’ve forgotten—and really, how much of a difference is there between teaching and reminding? 

Even if you don’t need reminding of anything, how glorious to feel seen. To take a quiz created by a total stranger—or maybe even an algorithm—and get the results back that yes, you are Carrie Bradshaw, and to go, “Yes, that’s right, you got it. I am Carrie Bradshaw!” And just like that, you feel a little more grounded, a little more sure of yourself. A little more a part of the world you exist in.

Personality quizzes—categorization in general—are largely about belonging somewhere. For a long time, I had “INFP” in my social media and dating bios to let people with compatible results know, “We’re alike!” (Never mind that I took the Myers-Briggs test a handful of times in my late teens and early twenties and got a variety of different results before landing, permanently, on INFP.) 

What you’re trying to belong to will depend on the type of quiz you’re taking: an enneagram quiz, for instance, can give you a label by which you can connect with other enneagram 4s (just an example—also my type), but a “Which Gilmore Girls character am I?” quiz can help you connect more deeply with a fictional world you love and feel like you’re a part of the action. And who doesn’t want to escape to their favorite fictional world?

That feels a little cringey to say. But in case you didn’t notice (I didn’t at first), I used the words “embarrassing,” “shameful,” and “humiliated” all within the first paragraph to describe the process of writing a personality quiz, and that’s because belonging—as well as its opposite, isolation—is…humiliating. Or rather, belonging and isolation aren’t embarrassing in themselves, but once you talk about them, they open wounds, in the speaker and anyone there to listen. Connecting to other people, or attempting to, is deeply rewarding and, at times, deeply painful. 

While most people don’t sincerely include “total Samantha” in their bios, I wonder about our reliance on labels as shorthand, either to help other people get to know us without having to talk to us (and possibly reject us), or to help us get to know other people without having to talk to them. It’s efficient, and if it’s loneliness we’re talking about, it reduces the potential for more hurt. 

But it also, of course, reduces people to icons when taken too seriously. A friend of mine was very into Myers-Briggs because she admittedly had trouble understanding where people were coming from without the label—a symptom, she declared, of being an ESTJ.

On the one hand, her self-knowledge was admirable. On the other hand, she ended up shutting down some difficult conversations with, “Ah, you’re saying this because you’re an INFP!” It left me feeling a little cut off. But I can also understand, to an extent, the desire to shut down an argument in such a way, rather than having to hear the other person out, explain your perspective, or change your mind—all vulnerable-making acts. (I, as an Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver, was happy to avoid confrontation anyway.)

Anyway, maybe a “Which Sex and the City Character Are You?” quiz or your horoscope or that dream you had about winning a marathon despite barely being able to run a mile in real life will elucidate your place in the universe or make you feel seen or give you something cool to write about in your “weekly” newsletter. But even if they don’t, they offer a distraction in the moment—and maybe one day the things that don’t seem to fit will fit, or they will change you to fit them. Maybe you’re a Carrie now and you know it, but you won’t always be a Carrie, and your quiz results say you’re a Samantha and you think, This is bogus, and it sort of is, because I don’t know how to make good quizzes yet. But maybe the universe is making a prediction here: you’ll be a Samantha one day, so just wait.