So much for the cult of personality tests, I never did marry Mick Jagger

The Youngest has done an online personality test, which informs her that the most prolific people with the same personality as hers are Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger and Robin Williams. One of the questions concerns whether you make back-up plans for backup plans. From that, and a hundred similarly daft questions, the puzzle masters have deduced that The Youngest has earned her place in alarming company.

Obviously, I had to do the test myself after that. Judge Judy, Laura Linney and Frank Sinatra, if you must know — though how those three ended up in the same cohort is anyone’s guess. At least Van Gogh and company had something in common — unless Judge Judy has dubious Mafia connections and Laura Linney her own court room, I can’t really connect the three, let alone feel I belong in their company. Maybe we just all aced the back-up plans question, while Vincent, Heath and company made a hames of it.

Anyway, when we stopped laughing at that, The Youngest reminded me of a quiz she did in a Spongebob comic when she was six. The purpose of the quiz was to ascertain what occupation young readers might grow up to do. The only three options were fisherman, rock star and teacher. The Youngest would become a fisherman, her answers indicated — which is ironic because she is the only member of our family who has never caught a fish. Which just goes to show how much Spongebob knows about career guidance.

There is something almost irresistible about doing quizzes to glean information about yourself that you already know. Women’s magazines have been mining that rich seam forever. ‘Are you a flirt?’, they will ask gravely, before testing your general flirtiness with questions about the way you pack your suitcase when you’re going on holidays. ‘Have you got what it takes to break the glass ceiling?,’ they’ll ask a week later, before posing more or less the same questions as last week. Still, millions of women pore over these pages: if you’ve ever perused an old magazine in a doctor’s waiting room, the chances are you’ll encounter neat biro marks around mostly bs in some quiz or other. ‘Mostly B?’ You’re a natural born flirt who will sleep her way to the executive bathroom! Have fun!’ Obviously, there is no science involved in these tests and precious little evidence of logic either. But still we’re drawn to them, wasting many precious minutes trying to decide if we’re more likely to cry at a sad film or a video of a kitten playing the piano.

And of course, as my eight-year-old self can testify, it’s easy to cheat your predicted destiny. Once you’ve figured out whether you want to be mostly A, B, C or D, you just keep ticking the relevant box, regardless of the question. If, for example, you want the outcome that reads “you’re attractive and popular and likely to win the Lottery,” then you just keep heading for whatever letter mostly brings you there, even if it means agreeing that the hardest time of your life was the 24 years you spent in a Turkish prison.

The first time I realised I could undermine whatever crude algorithms magazine quiz setters use was when I took a potentially lifechanging survey in Jackie magazine about which pop star I was likely to marry. I can’t actually remember now who I had already decided to marry at the age of eight, but I do know that it wasn’t Bryan Ferry, the match made for me the first time I took the quiz. So I did it again and changed my answers, and then again until eventually it led me to Mick Jagger or whatever unfortunate I had in my sights. Reader, I didn’t marry either. Which again, just goes to show how much quiz setters know about relationships.

There are some personality tests that purport to use real science and I gather that some American corporate employers actually use them as part of their recruitment process. The best known is the Myers Brigg Type Indicator, which I had hoped to do online in order to take cheap shots at its results here, but apparently the test has to be administered by a qualified professional, who, I presume, is not the person who answered the phones in the Jackie office back in the 1970s. I’m guessing the MBTI test doesn’t tell you how flirty you are or if you’ll marry Justin Bieber, so I’m not sure what the point of it is. Though if it could corral The Youngest into slightly more upbeat company, then it just might be worth the investment.