Ryan Hellyer

Have you ever clicked on one of those link bait’ish things you see on Facebook? I saw one a friend posted this afternoon labelled “What country do you really belong to?”, so I clicked it to find out which country I was really from. It asked a series of questions (which are shown below in the screenshots).

After saying I liked Coca Cola, ice cream and Donald Duck, I assumed it would guess I was from the USA, but instead it picked Germany. Amazingly, this is the exact country I live in. Impressive stuff right?

This isn’t the first time one of these tests has accurately picked me as belonging to a certain country. Not the country I am from, but the country I happpened to be living in at the time. When I lived in Norway, it was not uncommon for these things to suggest that I am Norwegian or Swedish at heart. Now that I live in Germany, they pick me as being German!

I figured that either my emotional nationality is changing over time, or there’s something fishy going on here. So I connected to a series of different VPN’s and answered the quiz again (and gave the same answers as before).

When I connected through a USA IP address, it guessed I was American. When I connected through a UK IP address, it guessed I was British. When I connected through a French IP address, it guessed I was French. When I chose less populated countries, like Canada or Australia, it guessed I was from all sorts of strange exotic places.

There is an important lesson to be learned here! You should never trust random click bait quizzes for accurately gauging, well, anything … just in case you were relying on these being accurate tests 😉