Why We're Still at Buzzfeed: Our Obsession with Personality Tests
- Malcolm
- Nov 14, 2025
- 7 min read
At public events I regularly attend, there are always a few men who stand out because of their outspokenness in emulating masculine archetypes: the intellectual person who speaks in a posh, passionate but emotionally detached articulation. Or the one who always has an opinion and whose hands are always itching for a mic in hand. And the other who tries their best to please the higher ups (by stooping lowly to echo slogans and attitudes). They always wear a suit, collared shirt and tie with dress pants when they show up. They stand uptight, always have formal tendency, those of the Oxford Gentlemen wannabes. (The Cambridgemen wear lab coats instead, as was the stereotype.) Personality tests would frame them as those most oriented to success.
The people around me - men too, told me that these are the men you should be like. At the time, I responded: ‘No? I am my own person after all.’ And they nodded in slight agreement, sensing the end of the argument. (here I've changed the hypothetical language to past tense since this is a retelling of previous events that have happened) I should’ve added: ‘There is no need for me to follow masculine personality types.’ I refrain from judging others today. What irritates me is that their behaviour also somehow had to be juxtaposed towards me, and that my external image to them—dubbed as my ‘personality’—was non-desirable and needed improvement. I should have also declared, more accurately, that there was no need for me to follow the ideals of the social environment I find myself in.
Fun fact, dear reader, I’m introverted. I won’t approach anyone unless I think they can match my energy - which is high stints of conversation with curious passion in a small, closed and intimate space after which we then get exhausted, tired and confused within mass crowds. Yes I get emotional a lot. I do cry when crashing out. My heart controls me more than my brain does. But If it’s a passion project or on a topic I am really into, I get super talkative and assertive (refer to: aura maxxing). Creative Subjectivity and Technical Objectivity are thought processes I strategically bring out depending on context. People think that I am confidently nonchalant by how I act when I don’t talk in a social setting, but I really am just shy, sometimes awkward.
So depending on what type of people know me and the scenarios I am, I show different sides of myself. And that has made personality tests a very unreliable source in knowing me. This is mostly because of the various ‘life experiences’ that shape my responses and inclination towards certain things or behaviours. My ‘personality’ is mostly a result of my life story and the others I’ve come in contact with. Of course reflection is a very disturbing thing you have to deal with.
Personality Tests as Projection
It is very easy to know an image of ourselves projected on a screen by taking up a personality test. The most famous of them being the MBTI test, a 16-variant character that measures intraversion/extraversion and other binary based traits by ranking order of agreement regarding which one would’ve acted or thought about. You are given a profile of yourself, describing yourself and recommendations on careers, attitudes and relationships.
It is precisely because of their generality that personality tests have been so affectionately accepted as a popular psychology. The body of knowledge built around profiling behaviour and preferences—being backed by the rationality of scientific research and scientific learning associations—gives personality tests a sense of legitimacy in comparison to more folk based divination practices of tarot or palm-reading. These results of personality tests have now influenced how we judge others in return.
But there are shortcuts to self-introspection that avoid confronting traumatic events. Personality tests are but a comfortable filter to the unpleasantness of individuality. Behaviours and preferences can be explained away, and with it comes an implicit directive of enabling us to think that we can change ourselves by being self-aware; classification of strengths and weaknesses, introversion and extraversion, can be regulated.
Being used to knowing oneself through a filter and methodology of profile classification by an invention of personality absolves one to face oneself through raw encounters that causes psychosis and mental duress. But they are necessary, with help and support from friends, to grow out of the shadows and become mature persons capable of reflection. Blindly following the word/advice of a personality test which somehow perfectly describes our behaviour, we then become resistant to self-introspection. Instead following advice from a personality test results which has no understanding of us as a grounded person with lives in the real world, but merely as avatar profiles who are only constituted by the data we input in with very limited options.
In other words, personality tests are a safe bet to enact an illusion and potential for self-control which we lead ourselves into believing in conscious change. If we have a desire to ‘be’ a classified personality archetype that appeals to us: say being a confident, outspoken person; we can follow advice that steers one towards the ideal. Under the guise of personality tests to understand ourselves, we have clung to a set of classifications that avoid confrontations about our own image.
Behaviours cannot be measured by spectrums. When one thinks so, they might be assured that their personality can be altered given conscious effort to change. From then onwards the pipeline to consuming self-help is around cultivating a self, recanting self-affirmating quotes at the expense of connecting with people who contribute to our behaviour.
All of us no doubt have shown raw behaviour and memories of our actions that we do not wish to confront or wish others to know. The safe option would be to catalogue it under a binary of strengths and weaknesses using the methodology of a discernible psychological test. This way our behaviours can be regulated and directed towards something else.
Personality Tests: Success Metrics?
Our present society is one of achievement and exposure. Classification of the ‘successful’ types and ‘failure’ types are a trope in the self-help and personal improvement groups, with a media and publishing ecosystem to be gobbled up in conferences or written in journals as reflections to just how much one measures one up against a set of metrics judging personality and behaviour.
Often the first act to ‘know thyself’ as the Greek maxim goes is to conduct a personality test - to know what you are. These tests would give you a comfortable idea of how well you fit into a professional management society’s classifiable standards in behavioural traits. No one cares in a factory if you’re extraverted or introverted, so long as you have the operational skills to complete production quotas in time. But employee behaviour occupied part of a service economy’s offerings, being educated white collar workers dealing with people. Contemporary professional service companies aggressively monitor employee behaviour - these made differences in board room meetings, presentation pitches and project management of whatever field they’re in. Which is why personality traits are ranked and tested obsessively to achieve maximum effectiveness and efficiency in cognitive outputs: the key pillar of the service economy.
These metrics translate very easily to ranking self-worth and self-image in order to succeed - that is the goal, which is why everyone tries to one-up each other in a(n imaginary) dark forest of competition should one subscribe to the idea that there is a desirable type for oneself to aspire to using a ranking system judged according to the usual personality metrics. Personal preferences are irrelevant.
Rage against the Metric
I am probably the only person in Malaysia that has ever told a professional audience that one fun fact about me is that I love Greek Mythology. Not reading, not writing nor storytelling. These I love too, but for me they are just fun, things I love indulging in because I love to know about this stuff to discover more, not learn to be more productive, charismatic or more knowledgeable. Unless you are an poshly educated man of privilege in Europe or North America with a bourgeois taste for everything classical, no one can ever be considered a success here in Asia by having an interest in Greek Mythology. I ended any possibility of comparison between others - full stop. No criteria or ranking to measure me against.
Knowing one’s ‘personality’ and encountering oneself are different things, the former acts under a mediated form of knowledge that guides the individual through anchored concepts. When behaviours are measured by a length or spectrum, one is assured that their personality is explainable by empirical scientific research in laboratories, and not by confronting trauma and other psychological distress, which - like it or not - still constitutes a part of ourselves.
We grow by the people and environment that we’ve encountered and react to. So long as we are alive there will always be interactions. But these cannot certainly be predicted, what matters is how we respond to it as our own choices to make. And a personality test’s recommendations certainly do not have full knowledge of your situation to make an informed decision for you. Only you can.
Writer's Notes:
What I wish is for everyone to be free to do what they wish to learn and make without being measured in a social ranking or driven on as a road to success, so I took up the writing of this article to break the illusion that you have to be productive or follow the rules of personality tests. You can decide to be your own person without any ranking to measure yourself against.
Writer's Biography:
Malcolm Marciana Wong is a third year student in the School of Humanities (the only school he really belongs to) who wants to make the best of his final year as an undergraduate without any heavy responsibilities. If you really care about the planet and love engaging in environmental advocacy using the creative arts, he will be your best friend. His motto, “Fight for what’s right, never follow the might.” His Life Goal: Restore Nature and Build Communities. His Life Advice: Have Fun, Break Things, Learn Stuff.
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