About

The Open-Source Psychometrics Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz is an online survey to determine which fictional character from the worlds of movies and television the user's personality most closely aligns.

History

According to the development page of the Open-Source Psychometrics Project (OSPP), the earliest update of the "What character are you test?" occurred on April 18th, 2019.^[1] However, the test did not go viral until April 2020, nearly one year later.

Features

The test offers users a series of questions, asking them to indicate on a slider which side of a spectrum they resemble. These indicators include "artistic vs. scientific," "indulgent vs. sober," "fast vs. slow," "normal vs. weird" and more.

At the end of the quiz, users are presented with their closes match from a list of 47 fictional universes, including Twin Peaks, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Sex and the City, The Big Bang Theory, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and more.

According to the OSPP development page:

This test assumes that a character's assumed personality is reflected in the average ratings of individuals. To collect this data a survey was developed. In it, the volunteer respondent rates 30 characters on 1 trait each, randomly drawn from a bank of 30 traits. With enough data, all the individual surveys can be combined into a comprehensive database of assumed personality.

Highlights

On April 2nd, 2020, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweeted ^[2] about the quiz. She tweeted, "I took this quiz https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/characters/
to see which fictional character I'm most like and." In the tweet, she included her results, which revealed her best match was the Harry Potter character Dumbledore. The post received more than 10,000 likes and 730 retweets in less than two days (shown below).

Within hours of this tweet, the test went viral. Throughout the day, others shared their results on social media (examples below).

That day, several media outlets reported on the quiz, including USA Today,^[3] Inverse,^[4] Refinery29,^[5] Nerdist,^[6] Yahoo,^[7] Pedestrian TV^[8] and more.

External References