6/27/2014

The History of the Quiz Transcript - On The Media

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< THE HISTORY OF THE QUIZ

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Friday, March 28, 2014
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Quizzes are catnip - tell me about me and not just on
Facebook. This week, the New York Times offered one, called Can You Spot the
Liar? And, apparently, the biggest feature in Slate's history was the widget to
Travoltafy your name! not a quiz exactly but close enough. Mine is Bruce Granite. If
youve ever wandered onto BuzzFeed, the reigning king of the quiz, you probably
know what actor would play you in the movie version of your life. Why we take
quizzes seems a little obvious but when we started taking them, not so much.
Writer Sarah Laskow tried to find out and located the birth of modern quizziness more
than a century ago, in womens magazines.
SARAH LASKOW: It was a lot about reflecting womens life as women back at them.

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One of the first regular quizzes, Lynn Peril reported in The Guardian was in Ladies

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Home Journal, called Making Marriage Work. And so, I think they were, at the very

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least, keeping women on their idea of what it is to be a woman. It was sort of policing

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femininity in that way, potentially.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm. But after there was the Ladies Home Journal, there

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was Cosmo.

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SARAH LASKOW: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

(and Isn't)

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Cosmo seemed to refine its own particular kind of quiz

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thats had an impact on everything that followed.

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SARAH LASKOW: It's like one of the first things you turn to when you buy a

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Cosmopolitan Magazine. And because they couldn't find the very first quiz ever in the

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media, I thought, well, why not look at Cosmo, because they've defined the quiz for so

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long. And I mean even there, you didn't really start seeing them regularly until after

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Helen Gurley Brown took over. And then around like 1966, you could see

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Cosmopolitan testing out this idea, like, how can we make our readers more engaged

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with this material that we have in some sort of interactive way? And the quiz was one

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way to do it.

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BROOKE GLADSTONE: The nature of the questions changed, too. I mean, from
the Ladies Home Journal days of making marriage work, Helen Gurley Brown's quizzes
had to do with gauging your confidence and your sexuality, and stuff like that?
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The History of the Quiz Transcript - On The Media

SARAH LASKOW: Yeah. The first ones werent about sex so much. The first ones

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were really about your life as a woman. So one of the first ones I found was, How to
tell if youre a good roommate?
And the next one I found was a little bit more about judging your inner life. It was this
really complicated scenario, where a wife was killed by a madman after she had cheated
on her husband. And it laid out this whole drama, and you were supposed to say who
was responsible for the wifes death.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This was in Cosmo.
SARAH LASKOW: Yeah, this was in Cosmo.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the way that I understand it, the wife is coming home
from her affair.
SARAH LASKOW: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: She's menaced by a madman on a bridge, and she has to
appeal to others for help.
SARAH LASKOW: There are six characters. There is the madman, the wife, the
husband and these helpers. Youre asked to say who you think was most responsible
for the wifes death, based on your sort of moral compass of blame. That says
something about you as a person. And I mean, you can't help but sit and take these
quizzes, so like I was taking this and I found out, you know, that I that
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You blame the madman first and then you blame the wife.
SARAH LASKOW: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dont you think the people who failed to help her have
more blame than she does, simply for having been on the bridge, cause it could have
happened to any passerby?
SARAH LASKOW: Thats true. I sort of thought the wife was responsible because it's
important to take, you know, responsibility for your own choices.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Youre a tough one!
SARAH LASKOW: [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] But anyway that's where Cosmo went, from
how do you judge yourself as a roommate to how do you judge yourself as a moral
human being.
SARAH LASKOW: Yeah, another one not that long after that asked you how well do
you know yourself.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You say that the readers didnt buy this.
SARAH LASKOW: Oh, no.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] But how do you know?
SARAH LASKOW: Well, they wrote in. People were skeptical that you really could
get to know yourself just from answering a series of questions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Your research suggested they were right.
SARAH LASKOW: Yeah. I mean, there is a lot of research that says that even tests
that are rooted in real psychology arent really telling us anything about ourselves. I
mean, the Myers-Briggs test is really popular in workplaces as a diagnostic tool, and
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psychologists don't believe that really says anything about what type of worker youre
gonna be or how youre gonna get along with your colleagues. And theres this really
famous psychology test, the Forer effect.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Its given to students?
SARAH LASKOW: I mean, I know a bunch of people who took it in Psych 101.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
SARAH LASKOW: You get a series of questions, just like one of these quizzes.
Youre told that these are gonna tell you about who you are. The next day everyone
gets a paragraph - that are the results of the test. And you get a second to read it, and
the teacher will ask, okay, who thinks this describes them? And, invariably, a ton of
people raise their hands, and only then is it revealed that everyone got the exact same
paragraphs.
[BROOKE LAUGHING]
We want to believe that something can tell us about ourselves. Our brains will just tell
us like, yes, thats you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Now, if there is an Ur quiz or an Ur
personality test, it would be the one that you describe in your piece, the Woodworth
Psychoneurotic Inventory, or WPI.
SARAH LASKOW: Yeah. I think thats widely regarded as one of the first
psychology-based personality tests in the US. It was designed for the Army around
World War I, to judge how well different soldiers would be able to deal with the
stresses of combat.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you take that one?
SARAH LASKOW: Oh yeah, of course!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Its more than a hundred questions. I mean, intelligence
tests, SATs, how broadly can we extrapolate about ourselves from any test?
SARAH LASKOW: Probably, you can learn something about yourself from the
Woodworth Psychoneurotic Inventory that you're not gonna learn about yourself from
a BuzzFeed quiz. But I think theres always gonna be a limit to how much a series of
questions can tell us about who we really are.
The reason we take these quizzes is cause we want to hear what we already know
about ourselves, mostly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, having taken dozens of them, do you feel that
youve eked out any new awareness?
SARAH LASKOW: I can't say that I feel like I've really learned anything deep about
myself from taking a bunch of quizzes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well then, let me ask you, does it make you uneasy to
cross a bridge over a river? [LAUGHS]
SARAH LASKOW: [LAUGHS] Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you feel like jumping off when you are in a high
place?
SARAH LASKOW: No.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: See, that is so weird. I do.

SARAH LASKOW: Oh, really?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One last question off of the Woodworth Psychoneurotic
Inventory.
SARAH LASKOW: Mm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you find it difficult to pass urine in the presence of
others? [LAUGHS]
SARAH LASKOW: Sometimes.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much.
SARAH LASKOW: Oh, youre welcome.
[BOTH LAUGHING]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Writer Sarah Laskow wrote, In search of the ur-quiz for
the Columbia Journalism Review.

GUESTS: Sarah Laskow

HOSTED BY: Brooke Gladstone
TAGS: cosmopolitan, magazines, media , media history, news, quiz

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The History of the Quiz

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On The Media is funded, in part, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation and the Jane Marcher Foundation.

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