By Rania Dawud

Zodiac signs, Myers-Briggs Type-Indicator (MBTI), the Enneagram scale, Hogwarts houses, love languages and whatever else there is, getting to know who we are through personality quizzes has always fascinated humans. 

Regardless of the validity or accuracy of those tests, we remain drawn towards finding a way to label ourselves.

But it’s not all fun and games; some companies actually use the MBTI test to better understand their employees, using the results to make wiser hiring or task-allocation decisions.

Sure, they seem to have merit in professional spaces, but why are they so interesting outside of the workplace? 

Perhaps it’s because we’re intrigued by getting an insight into who we really are from an outside party; we’d like to know how we are viewed by others, and personality quizzes deliver.

In a world with more ambiguities than certainties, we’d like to think that there are answers for the way we behave. It’s nice to have a long, dwindling explanation of why we might be irked by a certain person or how come we don’t enjoy parties, all so that those things don’t seem weird. 

Maybe we’re inherently self-absorbed and we want to see ourselves in a different light. Either way, the entertainment we get from those tests certainly makes for a lovely pastime or water cooler moment. 

Is there more to it though?

Is it that we want to be told who we are? We want to convince ourselves that we are complex individuals by labelling what lies beneath the surface? If that’s the case, once we see that others are the way they are because they too are complex, we then begin to understand our relationships with them better.

However, those labels are inaccurate because they are applied to something that isn’t fixed. We are constantly evolving and changing yet old habits die hard and someone’s core character doesn’t change. So if your horoscope tells you that you’re calm and mellow when in fact you’re hot-headed, there’s little chance that’s ever going to change.

Even though it’s best to take these tests’ results with a pinch of salt, sometimes they might offer a positive guide to steering our lives or certain situations in a way that’s more compatible with our personalities.