- We ran a survey with Morning Consult that asked nearly 9,000 Americans about their personality.
- We asked which characters from "Friends" and "Sex and the City" they identified as, what their Meyers Briggs type was and their astrological sign — even whether they were #TeamEdward or #TeamJacob
- America is a nation of Gryffindors, Starks, Rachels, Carries, and dog people
The internet is littered with personality quizzes. Which "Friends" character are you? Which sandwich? Which mid-tier burger joint? Which character from "The Godfather?""Naruto?""Sesame Street?" The format is so pervasive that it’s become a genre all to itself. Sites from Pottermore to BuzzFeed reap attention and revenue from users taking quizzes to discover who they really are.
We wanted to find out what was really going on here. So we partnered with Morning Consult for The Great American Personality Quiz. Sure, everyone's taken that Harry Potter house quiz, but how many Gryffindors are there, truly? Who hasn't tried out a "Friends" character quiz, but have we ever been told about the precise count of Phoebes? Plus, there's no reason to stop there: What is the relationship between “Friends” and the “Sex and the City” character archetypes? Does your favorite starter Pokemon have anything to do with your favorite Beatle?
Read on to discover the results of our survey!
You can find out more about our methodology here.
Americans are Gryffindors through and through.
Only 41% of the people surveyed could say which Harry Potter house they'd be sorted into, and most of those people went with the Hogwarts house of the three protagonists of the series, Gryffindor. The house of the primary antagonists of the series, the cunning Slytherins, came in last place, while Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff split the remainder.
One cool result is that the younger someone was, the more likely they were to have an answer to this question, but also the younger someone was the more likely they were to be in a house that wasn't Gryffindor. So much of the characterization of the other three houses in the young-adult series came after the fact and online, in places younger respondents may have had more access to.
We're a nation of Rachels.
Jennifer Aniston's outgoing, if flighty, Rachel Green was the "Friends" character most people said they identified with, but all six characters are fairly popular. On-again-off-again-on-a-break paramour Ross Geller came in last place. Interestingly, the strongest link connecting to respondents to the friends was gender: men overwhelmingly identified with Chandler, Ross or Joey, while women overwhelmingly identified with Rachel, Monica or Pheobe.
Most people are dog people.
Nationwide, dogs are more popular than cats, and our survey respondents agreed. About half of respondents identified as dog people, a quarter as equal fans of both of mankind's mammalian consorts, and about one in six as exclusively cat people. A robust 9% don't care for cohabitating with anything that's got more than two legs.
In the US, there are slightly more domestic cats than dogs, but that's because the average number of cats per cat household is higher than the average number of dogs per dog household. So while there may be more dog lovers than cat lovers, the cat fans really like their cats and like to own a few of them.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider