Are You a Personality Quiz Lover, Really? …and Why You’ll Love 7apps.Me
What is your true addition? How hippie are you? Which cute baby animal are you? What kind of model should you be? These are just some of the questions that, for some apparent (we’ll discover which soon – science!) reason, you want answered. For those of you who LOVE quizzes and tests, there’s no better destination than 7apps.Me which takes advantage of well-known psychological triggers to get you interested in all of the “daily quizzes” they offer! It’s not just seven apps as the well named 7apps.Me domain suggest!
What 7apps.Me uses is our natural inclination to create stories about our own experiences, as well as experience other’s experiences through stories they tell over coffee or in a formal conversation. In psychology, this viewpoint is called narrative psychology and deals how human beings (thats us!) construct stories to deal with experiences. As one of the most significant figures of American theory of narrative, Seymout Chatman says in his “Story and Discourse”:
The theory of stories are defined as an overt interpretation, the event being increasingly contextually dependent on the ability of the individual “reading-out” the story and the act of a writer authoring a story.
What does this have to do with little web and Facebook apps that reveal what kind of karma you have or what nickname is perfect for you? A lot, actually. Atlanta psychologist Robert Simmermon, Ph.D., told Huffington Post that humans in essence create their own “biographies” and personality quizzes such as the ones at 7apps.Me, take advantage of this natural trigger. They give us, as Simmermon points out, an “illusion of authenticity” and the opportunity to reaffirm what who we think we actually think of ourselves of being. While you might be set on how “hippie” you are, a quiz on the topic gives you the chance to reaffirm something you hope is true.
While 7apps.Me hasn’t been that vocal about its success (the site has over 1.7 MILLION likes on Facebook), another popular platform – Buzzfeed – has shared at least a bit about the success of its own quizes. Summer Anne Burton was originally hired to work at BuzzFeed in 2012. and then, at the end of 2013., noticed how quizes were quite popular. Not when they were first published, but actually afterwords: Various quiz-based posts on Buzzfeed had a second successful, long tail life. While Burton doesn’t think that people expect “scientific” results from personality quizes from websites such as 7apps.Me, she does agree that people love to know the results of them in a manner similar to astrology:
It’s not scientific, but if you have a good attitude, that doesn’t keep it from being fun. When you get the results, you can relate it to yourself. Sometimes, that relationship is, “Oh my gosh, I’m not a Zack Morris, I’m a Kelly Kapowski”.
There’s also a reason you know that the types of quizes that 7apps.Me have been seen before… The underlying system that we can analyse through narrative psychology has actually been used since the 1920s when it gained popularity in the US, all thanks to the Myers-Briggs’ test and the work of noted psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
Jung’s book and theories, that the test was based on, was primarily aimed to identify a common psychic imbalance based on the theory that there are four principal psychological functions by which humans experience the world: thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling.
The test that was a precursor to later personality quizzes, is used in 89 of the Fortune 100 to determine a job applicant’s psychological disposition to a particular job, which was not Jung’s original intention. As Forbes contributor Jordan Shapiro notes, not even Jung could have theorized how much we like to be categorized.
Today, 7apps.Me offers hundreds of quizes that categorize you in at least a dozen languages including English, French and Romanian. While you’re clicking on them and getting the answers that Carl Jung knew you’d desire, at least you know why you’re doing it!
