From Rice Purity to BuzzFeed: a short history of the confessional quiz

There's a particular kind of quiz that people can't resist. It asks you something a little personal, turns your answers into a score or a label, and then dares you to tell your friends. CountMyBits (a calculator for how many, ahem, bits you’ve seen) is one of these. So is nearly every "Which ___ are you?" quiz you've ever taken in a waiting room. This guide traces where the format came from, using the original documents wherever we could find them.

1924: ten questions in a student newspaper

The best-documented ancestor of the confessional quiz appeared on the front page of The Thresher, the student newspaper of what was then the Rice Institute in Houston, on March 7, 1924¹. The headline was "Rice Girls Not Quite Half Bad," and the article reported the results of what it called a "Purity Test."

By modern standards the questions were almost sweet. The original page lists all ten, including "Have you ever played cards for money?", "Have you ever sworn?", "Have you ever told a lie? White fibs are not counted," "Did you ever dance conspicuously?" and "Have you ever been engaged and broken it?"

The method will look familiar to anyone who's taken a quiz online. According to the article, the questions were asked of 119 women students, who scored themselves "ten for every question that they could truthfully say 'no' to." They didn't sign their names; they gave only their year. The reported average was 62. The paper broke the results down by class and noted that both the best score of 100 and the worst score of 10 came from freshmen.

Read today, the article is also a reminder of how the format can go wrong. It was given only to women, and it treated their answers as material for jokes about their morals. The joke landed on the people who took part. That's a theme the format would keep running into.

1974 to 2012: the test keeps coming back

The Thresher itself documented the test's later life in a 2017 feature by Emily Abdow, "Purity Test evolves, spreads beyond Rice."² Some milestones from that reporting:

1. 1974

   The ten-question test resurfaced in the paper, with a slip readers could cut out and mail in. According to the Thresher, the results were never published.

2. 1988

   A very different version ran, with 100 questions each worth one point, instead of 10 questions worth 10 points each. Its content was far more adult than the 1924 original, and the Thresher's own retrospective calls parts of it alarming.

3. 1998

   By this edition, the Thresher reports, the most objectionable items from 1988 had been edited out, though later versions still drew criticism.

4. 2005

   The Thresher reported on a "tamer O-Week" in which the test was banned after the coordinator said it could amount to harassment.

5. 2011

   The paper's Backpage (humor page) editors refused to publish the test, according to the 2017 feature, "citing its divisive nature of separating students based on score."

6. 2012

   The same editors decided to run a new version anyway, reasoning that if they didn't, orientation groups would use older versions with worse content. That 2012 rewrite is the one most people now know as the Rice Purity Test.

By 2017, the Thresher reported that the official online version it hosts had been visited 1,524,204 times "in just the past year," with Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago and New York as the top cities for test-takers. The test had escaped its campus.

We're deliberately not reproducing the modern test's questions here. What matters for this history is the shape of the thing: a list of personal questions, a self-scored number, and a moment where everyone compares.

The other branch: magazine quizzes

Running alongside the campus purity test was a gentler tradition. As the Associated Press put it in a 2014 article³, personality quizzes "have been around for decades, gracing the covers of women's and teen magazines with questions designed to lure us in."

The magazine version swapped the score for a label. You weren't a 62; you were a "romantic" or an "adventurer." The format was more flattering, and that turned out to matter a lot.

2014: the year of "Which ___ are you?"

In early 2014, BuzzFeed turned the personality quiz into a phenomenon. The AP piece, by reporter Meghan Barr and published February 24, 2014, described the moment:

• A team of "about 100 content creators" at BuzzFeed had been "producing one to five quizzes every single day for the past two months."
• The push began after editors noticed that a quiz called "Which 'Grease' Pink Lady are you?" "ranked among the most-trafficked posts of 2013." Then, in mid-January, "Which city should you actually live in?" went viral.
• At the time of the article, the most popular quiz, "Which State Do You Actually Belong In?", had "generated about 41 million page views."

Traditional newsrooms noticed too. A few months later, Nieman Lab's summary of the leaked New York Times innovation report⁴ (May 15, 2014) noted that the Times' dialect quiz "was the most popular piece of content in the paper's history with more than 21 million pageviews."

The design lesson: make the result a compliment

The most revealing line in the 2014 coverage came from BuzzFeed's Summer Burton, quoted in the AP article. She explained why the quizzes never insulted anyone:

Put the two branches side by side and you can see the split. The purity test produced a number and invited judgment, and for decades people argued about whether it made newcomers feel bad. The magazine and BuzzFeed quizzes produced a label and made sure it was flattering, and people shared them by the millions.

Where CountMyBits fits

CountMyBits borrows from both. Like the campus test, it gives you a number (an absurdly inflated one). Like the magazine quiz, it makes sure that number comes with a compliment, whatever it is.

We also learned from the purity test's rougher history:

• No ranking people. The 2011 Thresher editors objected to sorting students by score. We don’t sort anyone: no number is better or worse, and none of our lines imply one is.
• No graphic content. Results are drawn as roses, kitties and eggplants, and the quiz's wording stays behind an 18+ check.
• Obviously silly math. The number is inflated on purpose (see How it works), so nobody can mistake it for a verdict.
• Sharing is your call. Nothing is uploaded unless you tap share. Why we share at all is the subject of our next guide, Why We Can't Stop Sharing Our Quiz Results.

A hundred years after a student newspaper asked 119 women whether they'd ever danced conspicuously, the confessional quiz is still here. The best version of it, we think, is the one where everyone walks away laughing.

Want to try ours? Count my bits (18+). Playing with a group? Read Group Quiz Etiquette first.