Mirror Mirror on the Wall...

Well, this article doesn't have much to do with Snow White per se.  You certainly won't find references to the princess or her prince, or the 7 other men in her life here.  So what, pray, can be the point of this article?  Read on to find out.

If you have ever found yourself flipping instinctively to the horoscope pages or furiously scanning websites like Blogthings or Emode for every possible personality test, you probably have what we call the ��mirror-mirror-complex'.  Either that, or you're just extremely bored, like how this intern here gets sometimes. 

What does this all mean then?  No, we're not going into all that jazz surrounding "who am I" questions and identity-seeking.  Perhaps what we want to find out here is just whether all these personality tests are really all that they claim to be - like the mirror that the queen uses in Snow White; do personality tests ala "what is your exotic dancer name" and the like, truly reflect who you are?  How many moments have you had, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, gaping at the incredulity of their analyses?  Or better still, find yourself nodding and agreeing with every point raised?  We know you want to know (or at least we think we do), so a mini experiment of sorts was administered... with the Youth.SG crew and some others putting a random test to the test

"What flavour ice cream are you?"

Short enough, simple enough and far-removed enough from 'human' attributes, the response towards its accuracy were overwhelmingly crushing.

"I'm an old fart, that can't be me" one of them said. 

Another commented that the list of questions was just too short.

Still another sent out an email calling for 'strawberry ice cream' persons, apparently the kind of people who matched her 'chocolate chip' personality best.

There was also the other intern who mentioned her results being pretty close to reality, save for the fact that she wasn't a party-person.

So can these personality tests really be true?  Or at least true enough for comfort?

Methinks not.  

Despite many times feeling extremely flattered at how my results paint me as the perfect person/ girlfriend/ friend/ pet/ auntie/ smurf/ exotic dancer/ care bear... (the list could go on), I have to admit that having a million people thinking or being exactly like me isn't exactly the most realistic notion.  Somehow the thought that my personality can be categorized and put into range within such limited options just doesn't strike me as being something I want to believe in.  While one might say that you can never fully understand a man (or a woman in my case), personality tests available online are perhaps more for the entertainment than the truth.

And we can tell that nature from the amusing themes they take on alongside the short and snappy questions that make you want to guffaw out loud as you answer them.  

How about horoscopes then?  Well, I've never really been a full-fledge believer of horoscopes and I don't suppose I will be. The logic remains the same.  However, a professor for one of my first university classes did this experiment once.

In it, he made us all take back a sheet of paper where he had compiled the week's horoscope - with the astrological names removed of course.  Giving us instructions to indicate which ones were true for us by the end of the week, he would collect them back then.  When the statistics came (this was an experiment after all), they showed more than 80% in error of what our ��true' horoscopes were in correspondence to how our week went.  How's that for accuracy?  

True, sometimes the 'predictions' do show up in spookily coincidental ways.  But there are some that can get a tad too superficial for any relevance at all.  A friend of mine once recalled how a fortune teller had foretold her future, telling her almost Mr Miyagi-ishly (the one from "Karate Kid", not the famous blogger) that she would succeed, if she would only put her mind to things. 

I was flabbergasted.  

Not because it was chillingly true to the bone but because it could have been applied to just about everyone...said with the same gravity of course. 

So while I still plough through personality tests (a girl's gotta find her entertainment somewhere!), a firm believer of the results or horoscopes I am not.  I guess the choice always boils down to the personal, but an advice perhaps is to always go into these with a pinch of salt in one hand, eyes open and of course, a huge sense of humour.  

That being said, I really wonder if the queen in Snow White asked anything else?  If that even matters that is.  

For the soul that aches to know who he/she is, do not fret.  There are, of course, personality tests out there that have been used to profile businesses and personalities with the utmost goal for accuracy.  A selection of these are the NEO-PI-R, the MMPI and MBTI. Click on the links to find out more about them.

Images taken from stock.xchng

This article is syndicated from Youth.SG