Deceptive facade of personality quizzes: Are you being manipulated?

Chyung Eun-ju

By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho

Nowadays, it's become common that we receive personality quizzes from our friends, and participating in them can be quite addictive. In-depth psychological assessments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator have become incredibly popular, to the point that many people in our social circles know their MBTI and introduce themselves with it as if it's an important and relevant aspect of their identity. The Myers-Briggs test is still used by approximately 10,000 businesses, 2,500 universities and colleges and 200 government agencies in the United States, including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. But to be frank, many psychological assessments have been criticized and deemed unreliable, or even discriminatory, by the scientific community.

Despite this, personality quizzes have always had a sense of credibility in the eyes of many people, especially when associated with more reputable forms of personality analysis. Quizzes manage to have the right balance of being entertaining and presenting scientific logic to their results, and are designed to create the impression of truth or at least the possibility of truth. Just as horoscopes, quizzes are written with relatable pieces of information people can identify with.

Recently, we took the "Label Sticker Test," by K-Test, created by a South Korean company called Cookie Rocket Co. Ltd. This company creates a variety of enjoyable personality and dating quizzes and has amassed more than 50 million users globally. It's fair to say that nearly every member of the MZ Generation in South Korea has taken the "Label Sticker Test" and shared their results with others.

What puzzled us was that in order to see the results, we had to be redirected to Coupang. Which has us thinking of the popular adage that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch," so why should personality tests be any different?

With a little investigation, we found that the reason behind this is that if the quiz taker makes a purchase from Coupang within 24 hours, a portion of the profit will go to K-Test. Although K-Test's site states that "All content is provided for fun and entertainment purposes only," there are clearly other motives behind their quizzes.

What was even more puzzling was that not many people seemed to be concerned with the redirection to Coupang. People can't just get enough of such quizzes even when they have little to do with reality. These quizzes help articulate who you know yourself to be but do not reveal who you really are. Personality is a fluid concept, so we may have an idea of who we are but we may not fully understand ourselves. That's why people love personality quizzes ― they help us confirm our self-perceptions and provide a sense of identity in the world. We have a need for self-reflection, which these quizzes fulfill to some extent.

Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, graduate students in Cambridge University's Psychometrics Center, a department that studies online psychological assessment, conducted a brief personality quiz on Facebook. This quiz evaluated individuals on the "big five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Participants who took the quiz were given the choice to share their Facebook profiles with Kosinski and Stillwell.

The two researchers amassed the largest-ever collection of psychometric scores and corresponding Facebook profiles. They were surprised at how easy it was to engage people. Stillwell sent the quiz to his Facebook friends, who took the quiz and shared it on their profiles, resulting in thousands of people taking it each day. Over the course of a few years, Kosinski and Stillwell gathered information from millions of Facebook users. The researchers then developed an algorithm that was surprisingly accurate in predicting how people think, feel, and behave.

Kosinki's predictive approach caused controversy during the U.S. election, even though he was not directly involved with the data firm hired by Trump's campaign. Reports suggest that his research may have been brought over to Cambridge Analytica by a young colleague with connections to the firm's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories Group (SCL). Cambridge Analytica denied any connection to Kosinski's work, and while the firm initially claimed that its psychographic profiling played a significant role in Trump's victory, it later admitted that it had not used the approach to influence voters.

However, it is not new knowledge that personal data can be collected online and that there are several ways to use this data to influence people. For example, Barack Obama had already used psychometrics to target individual voters before Cambridge Analytica.

The smartphone, internet and social media platforms are all personality quizzes. Every page visit, web search and "like" are gathered and correlated, so even before taking a quiz, you are already providing some information about yourself.

We already know once we browse something, the minute we open Instagram, there is an intrusive ad related to what we have searched. Or that political campaigns that know you have a likelihood of anxiety target you with ads concerning the dangers of specific political bodies that you may have aversion to due to the data you have provided.

Although various states are adopting measures to regulate the collecting and processing of data, namely our personal data, through regulatory laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act in Canada and the General Personal Data Protection Law (LGPD) in Brazil, the majority of the population are still unaware of their rights regarding their data or they believe that the provision of their data is acceptable if what they gain in exchange holds value to them. In the case of personality quizzes, participants may even be aware that their data is being collected and processed by the companies behind the quizzes but they are willing to accept this in exchange for entertainment or knowledge purposes.

So a company that has a desirable and trendy product, and that is skilled at psychological targeting, could have more powerful tools at its disposal, allowing it to influence behavior by comprehending an individual's thought processes and emotional attachments.

We are always reflecting on who we are, but our personalities are fluid. We are open to suggestions and the more credible people find personality quizzes, the more we trust a computer to tell us about our personalities, and we give algorithms the power to manipulate what we think, how we act and what we feel.

Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is studying for a master's degree in marketing at Seoul National University. Her research focuses on digital assets and the metaverse. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in IP and digital law.