Why we can't stop sharing our quiz results

You finish a quiz, you get your result, and before you've really read it your thumb is already heading for the share button. You're not alone. Whole media strategies have been built on that impulse. This guide looks at what research and reporting say about why sharing a result feels so good, and what that means for a quiz like ours.

Talking about ourselves is rewarding, literally

In 2012, psychologists Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, writing from Harvard University's Department of Psychology, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a blunt title: "Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding."¹

Their starting point is a striking observation. According to the paper's abstract, "humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences." The researchers wanted to know why.

Across five studies, they found that:

• Self-disclosure "was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system," which are areas linked with reward.
• People "were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self." In other words, they would accept a little less money in exchange for a chance to talk about themselves.
• Two further studies suggested the effect came from two separate things: the value of thinking about yourself, and the value of simply sharing information with someone else.

The authors conclude that our tendency to talk about our own experiences "may arise from the intrinsic value associated with self-disclosure."

That's a lab finding about self-disclosure in general, not about quizzes specifically. But it helps explain something every quiz-maker knows: people want to say "here's me."

A quiz result is self-disclosure with training wheels

The trouble with self-disclosure is that it's risky. Tell someone something real about yourself and you might be judged. Quizzes offer a way around that.

When the Associated Press covered the 2014 boom in BuzzFeed quizzes, psychology professor Gwendolyn Seidman told the reporter that quizzes "allow people to share personal information without compromising their own privacy," as the AP article² paraphrased her. Her description of why: "Those questions are easier to answer than a real personality test... You can turn it into some information about yourself — without actually doing the hard work of really thinking hard about yourself."

That's the trick. A result like “742 bits, illustrated as roses and eggplants” or “Which city should you live in: Paris” says something about you without requiring a confession. It's a little flag you can wave.

We share to compare (and to connect)

The same AP piece quoted psychologist Denise Friedman on why quizzes travel so fast: "In our age, we're constantly reflecting on who we are, and technology has really changed the way we interact. I think we are constantly engaging in social comparison and thinking about where we stand."

It also opened with a moment that will be familiar to anyone in a busy group chat. A 37-year-old quiz fan in New York City described a snowy afternoon when she and several friends took quizzes and texted each other the results: "It turned into an all-day group text message fest, where it was just picture after picture."

That's the part we think matters most. Sharing a result is rarely about the result. It's an excuse to talk. A score or a silly result gives the group something to react to, tease about and riff on.

Why flattering results get shared more

If people share results to say "here's me," then the result had better be one they're happy to show. BuzzFeed understood this. Summer Burton, then BuzzFeed's managing editorial director, told the AP the goal was results that are "specific enough that it feels personal, but they're also a compliment." The article added that the quizzes were "overwhelmingly upbeat and lighthearted in nature, a calculated decision by the people engineering them."

There's a darker version of the same dynamic. When a quiz produces a number that people use to rank each other, sharing can turn into pressure. The Rice Thresher's 2017 history of the Rice Purity Test³ quotes an orientation coordinator at Rice's Jones College, which banned the test from its 2017 orientation week: "Although most people may seem comfortable in the moment while taking the test, there are latent, widespread, and lasting impacts that can make new students uncomfortable and self-conscious about what they have or have not done."

The same article also quotes a first-year student at another Rice college who had the opposite experience: "After sharing our numbers and seeing a whole spectrum of scores, I no longer felt like I should be ashamed and it really was just a good laugh for my group and I."

Same activity, two very different outcomes. The difference seems to be whether the group treats the numbers as a ranking or as a laugh. (We wrote more about that in Group Quiz Etiquette.)

How CountMyBits is built around this

We made a few deliberate choices because of everything above.

Every result is a compliment. A zero is “still in the original packaging.” A five-digit number gets “the calculator is sweating.” There’s no result you’d be embarrassed to post.

The number is obviously a joke. The math is inflated on purpose (see How it works), so a result isn't a real disclosure about anyone's life. It's a flag to wave, not a confession.

The pictures are friendly. Results are drawn as roses, kitties, eggplants and other flowers and produce, so a result can sit in a group chat without anyone wincing.

Sharing is opt-in. Nothing is uploaded unless you tap a share or invite button. Tap Download and the image is made on your device and stays there. Prefer to keep it to yourself? Close the tab. (The details are in our FAQ and Privacy Policy.)

Share kindly

A few habits make sharing more fun for everyone:

• Share your own result, not someone else's. If a friend shows you theirs, ask before you post it anywhere.
• React to the result, not the person. “The calculator is sweating” is a fun reply. Guessing what someone's number "means" isn't.
• Let people skip. Some friends will want to play and some won't. Both are fine.
• Remember it's a joke. As a University of Central Florida student told the Thresher about the purity test, "it's just a test, it's just a number, it doesn't define who you are as a person."

The urge to share is human, and maybe even, as Tamir and Mitchell's work suggests, a little bit wired in. The best quizzes give that urge somewhere happy to go.

Ready for a number worth posting? Count my bits (18+). Curious where all this started? Read From Rice Purity to BuzzFeed.