Which Reaction GIF are you?

February 3, 2016 1:00 PM

(Multiple YouTube links) Mike Rugnetta says (via four small, linked interactive YT videos and a 14+ minute presentation worth 40% of his final mark): Personality quizzes draw us in with the promise of telling us something about ourselves, but do they truly succeed? We constantly seek to categorize our world, including ourselves. It gives us a sense of belonging, and can help us to make more sense of our thoughts and feelings. We want to be understood, but do these quizzes actually understand us, or are they simply reaffirming what we already know?

You may know Mike from such automated information kiosks as "Welcome to Springfield Airport", the PBS Idea Channel, and podcasts such as Reasonably Sound. If you don't, you should.

posted by maudlin (19 comments total)

I already know which gif I am.
posted by drezdn at 1:05 PM on February 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

How old are cheap personality quizzes? They've been in magazines for at least a while.
posted by little onion at 1:14 PM on February 3, 2016

Personality quizzes draw us in with the promise of telling us something about ourselves, but do they truly succeed?

Is this a trick question?
posted by octobersurprise at 2:02 PM on February 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

Supposedly I am Weebay. I don't know who Weebay is, but I won't broadcast that fact widely and just pretend like I know what's going on. This is surprisingly accurate.
posted by benito.strauss at 2:07 PM on February 3, 2016

"As long as they're generating clicks, who cares?!" said marketing departments everywhere.

Quizzes feel like a marketing gimmick that play on our ego: we will engage with the quiz if the reward is we get to feel special about ourselves and/or show our peers we're special (I'm smart, I'm funny, etc).

Of course the brand running the quiz gets data/engagement/exposure/etc out of the bargain.
posted by Outside Context Problem at 2:15 PM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I shut it off when he said "Reaction jiyfe." IT'S PRONOUNCED GIF IS MY REACTION, CAPTAIN BADSUIT
posted by Shepherd at 2:20 PM on February 3, 2016 [6 favorites]

But how do you feel about bacon bowls? We'll never know now.
posted by maudlin at 2:23 PM on February 3, 2016

I shut it off when he said "Reaction jiyfe."

"Jiyfe" is his way of saying it as neither "gif" nor "jif" so it's guaranteed to be wrong, instead of prolonging the discussion by saying it one way or the other.
posted by Hamusutaa at 2:45 PM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Jiyfe" is his way of saying it as neither "gif" nor "jif"

That's like hearing someone try to pronounce s/he. Gah.
posted by Ickster at 2:53 PM on February 3, 2016

I also already know my reaction gif.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:10 PM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

is his jacket too big?
posted by andrewcooke at 3:23 PM on February 3, 2016

Mine's a jpeg.
posted by klangklangston at 3:55 PM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I shut it off when he said "Reaction jiyfe." IT'S PRONOUNCED GIF IS MY REACTION, CAPTAIN BADSUIT

That was my impulse too, but I persevered and it told me my reaction gif was a "nope" gif. So accurate!
posted by juv3nal at 4:43 PM on February 3, 2016

I know without clicking that I am Dramatic Chipmunk.
posted by Kafkaesque at 5:01 PM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

My gif.

but sometimes...

or...

or when I'm watching MST3K or the news...

or... (wait for it).
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:09 PM on February 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

i'm a 'nope' gif. hm.

I think calling it 'jiyfe' was meant not to bias the test-taker towards any particular answer, but maybe that's being too generous

recently on tumblr there's been a tag yourself meme flying around which basically harkens back to the facebook days (everything old is new again!) of tagging friends on a set of images, occasionally with descriptions below them. but you get to tag yourself as one of the characters presented to you. for example, I'm kit kat [full but probably obvious disclosure: self-link][another full disclosure: i love this meme]

before that, the 'the signs as ______' meme could be seen just about anywhere. but the rise of the 'tag yourself' meme among some users raised similar questions to that in the fpp and naturally the discourse [another self link!] sprang up around the question of what is the superior meme with some people praising the usefulness of the determinism inherent in the 'the signs as' meme vs. the allegedly self-indulgent, free will nature illustrated in the 'tag yourself' meme (i disagree, but i digress)

anyway. this was fun.
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 5:09 PM on February 3, 2016

I always assumed that any answers I provided on those things would be dissected and/or collated for targeted advertising. someone has got to be interested in collecting that data.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 5:26 PM on February 3, 2016

He's been using "jyife" for ages now, nothing to do with this quiz.

Online quizzes have been a thing long before Buzzfeed. The longform personality questions ala Proust have been around since at least Livejournal/Myspace if not longer, OKCupid started as a quiz platform, and Quizilla used to be the quiz maker du jour of the early 2000s.
posted by divabat at 6:22 PM on February 3, 2016

Online personality quizzes are an echo from the field of psychometrics, some of its assumptions, and its math. Psychometricians work from the assumption that it's possible to get at underlying things about a person by asking enough questions, and that also some questions are better than others at getting at that underlying characteristic.

The theory behind this is item response theory, which offers mathematical ways to evaluate the validity of individual questions and a way to evaluate how likely it is that questions are measuring the same thing (contrast with classical test theory).

Standardized tests, for example, rely on psychometrics-- the designers of the test don't really care if you can calculate the angles on a triangle from the length of its sides in the specific cases they offer. What they care about is whether you have a certain level of trigonometry knowledge. So they construct collections of questions that set out to get at some underlying factor (a latent trait) about a person.

Just to illustrate, one of the focuses of the field has been to develop ways to calculate the reliability of a set of questions. For example, you would expect that if a certain set of questions all reveal some underlying factor about people, then the answers would be highly correlated, not only within a single person's responses, but across all responses. Cronbach's alpha measures that consistency.

Early online dating services invested pretty heavily in psychometric methods, but the OKCupids and Tinders of the world throw away the idea of theory-based psychometrics and go straight for machine learning. Those sites care less about asking reliable questions based on well-grounded theory of personality. They just hope that if enough people behave in consistent ways, that the machine will know, even if there's no human explanation for what works.

In contrast, these fun online quizzes are mostly decision trees. Since I doubt anyone did any kind of work to develop fun online quizzes that were mathematically reliable, the data is probably all but useless to the people who hold it.
posted by honest knave at 5:30 AM on February 4, 2016 [2 favorites]