Online personality tests are replacing genuine introspection, argues Gerardo Viera. Our need for simple explanations for our behaviours and psychology misses the complexities that shape them. These self-diagnoses can be dangerous, too; they can warp the very thing they attempt to name.

“Are you extroverted?” This question came up with some friends the other day, and someone mentioned a heuristic that is meant to answer the question. If you find social interactions energising, then you’re an extrovert. If you find social interactions draining, then you’re an introvert. After reassuring each other that we didn’t find each other draining, we realised that the simple heuristic couldn’t answer our question. Like most people, we all found some interactions draining while others energising. If we wanted to answer this question, to say something definitive about ourselves, then we would have to turn to another source of evidence. Luckily, a few of us had already taken online tests that located us somewhere between the extremes of introversion and extroversion, so we had our answers.

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It might seem unusual that we need help from tests to answer questions about our psychology, but it’s not so odd that we should resort to tests to gain this self-knowledge.

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This sort of scenario, if not the details, should be familiar. With the help of social media, the internet has enabled a personality testing industry (worth more than $2 billion) to flourish. These tests promise to help us understand what sort of people we are and provide insight into why we behave the way we do. They tell us where we sit on the autism spectrum, our Myers-Briggs personality type, whether we’re imagistic thinkers, our risk aversion, our ADHD status, and how we approach romantic relationships.

It might seem unusual that we need help from tests to answer questions about our psychology, but it’s not so odd that we should resort to tests to gain this self-knowledge. It appears relatively effortless to know what we believe or desire, whether we like the taste of coriander or whether we’re happy or sad. Our mental lives seem clear to us through introspection (the supposed mental faculty which monitors our internal mental lives). However, introspection, at least since the work of Descartes in the 17^th Century, has been thought to provide us with access to our “occurrent mental states”. These are the thoughts, emotions, and experiences that come into (and out of) consciousness at specific moments in time.

But these online tests don’t tell us about these fleeting mental states. Instead, they tell us something about our personalities and psychological characteristics, including our psychological tendencies that manifest over prolonged periods. For these sorts of phenomena, introspection is an ill-suited tool. In the absence of these tests, we would have to rely on the judgments of others or on intensive self-reflection to learn about our personality traits.

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There’s another reason why many of us find these tests compelling. Understanding our behaviour is complicated and perplexing. It is puzzling so that many of us will pay experts to help us learn about ourselves. Yet, understanding our personalities and psychological characteristics is crucial since it involves gaining knowledge about seemingly fundamental and stable psychological features that, in turn, allow us to understand, explain, and predict our own behaviours.

This taps into a deep-rooted human tendency to make sense of the world around us by trying to uncover cause-and-effect relationships. Even our perceptual capacities, those that are shared with a range of non-human animals, seem to be involved in uncovering causal relationships between events (for examples, see the McGurk Effect and the Motion-Bounce Illusion).

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Our need for a simple causal narrative understanding of our own behaviours sometimes misses the realities of why we behave the way we do.

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The same aim of uncovering the causal structure of the world applies to our own mental lives. We often try to make sense of our own behaviours by inferring causes and effects from observed events. This can be rather mundane at times. We infer that someone finds something funny because we see them laugh. I sometimes infer that I’m tired, angry, or anxious based on how I behave rather than relying on introspection. The same happens in certain delusions as well. Many stroke patients end up with partial paralysis on one side of their body. In most cases, these people are aware of their paralysis, but some people also suffer from anosognosia, a condition in which they are unaware of their own deficits. When asked to move their paralysed hand, instead of reporting that they cannot, they confabulate and invent stories to explain why they are choosing not to move their hand. They may claim that they’re tired from signing paperwork, so they would rather not move their hand. They see that they fail to move their hand and come up with an explanation that misidentifies the cause of this failure. This is a case where an attempt to uncover the causal structure of our own mental lives goes wrong. Our need for a simple causal narrative understanding of our own behaviours sometimes misses the realities of why we behave the way we do.

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They aren’t mere games – but are games that employ methods and theories which aim towards truth and self-discovery. Yet, there are reasons for thinking that these tests may be giving us a false understanding of the self.

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Online personality tests promise to provide us with self-knowledge that will help us to make sense of our lives. Many of these tests, but not all, have been developed in response to advances in the cognitive sciences. They aren’t mere games – but are games that employ methods and theories which aim towards truth and self-discovery. Yet, there are reasons for thinking that these tests may be giving us a false understanding of the self. While some tests have their origins in theory and methodology from the cognitive sciences, the tests we find online are often poor versions of these validated methods. Other tests, like the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, rest on rather slippery (or outdated) theoretical foundations.

Some of these tests might simply be invalid measures and fail to live up to their advertising. But there’s another concern that arises if we take these tests to uncover stable truths about ourselves. Many psychological and psychiatric traits are what Ian Hacking called “looping kinds”: they are responsive to how they are classified and treated. The physicist who studies electrons studies a subject that is indifferent to how it is classified. Electrons couldn’t care less what the physicists say about them. However, we are different. When we label ourselves, or when the online test labels us – as risk-averse, extroverted, or neurotic – this can then influence our behaviours. These labels may not be tracking invariant aspects of our psychological makeup but may instead influence malleable aspects of our psychology. However much we may wish to understand ourselves better, we cannot rely on these tests to uncover deep psychological truths (like a telescope into the mind) without the risk that they may be warping and reshaping the very things they are purporting to measure.