There’s little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It’s possible to perceive both images by shifting one’s perspective, but it’s the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.
But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.
In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the “rabbit-duck illusion,” in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one’s perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.
Such images have long fascinated scientists and philosophers because they seem to represent different ways of seeing. So naturally there is a substantial body of research drawing parallels between such images and various sociological, biological, or psychological characteristics.
For instance, a 2010 study examined BBC archival data on the duck-rabbit illusion from the 1950s and found that men see the duck more often than women, while older people were more likely to see the rabbit. A 2018 study of the “younger-older woman” ambiguous image asked participants to estimate the age of the woman they saw in the image. Older participants over 30 gave higher estimates than younger ones. This was confirmed by a 2021 study, although that study also found no correlation between participants’ age and whether they were more likely to see the older or younger woman in the image.
