Mental Age Test

About

The Mental Age Test, also known as the Mental Age Quiz, is an online personality quiz that measures one's "mental age," as in how old they act based on their actions, viewpoints and lifestyle. The test became a prominent TikTok trend in mid-2022 when users compared a picture of themselves and their current age to what their mental age test results were.

Origin

Mental age tests have been an online feature since as early as 2009,^[1] however, the URL to this primary mental age test is no longer viable. On August 10th, 2010, the webpage mymentalage.com^[2] was launched and became the primary mental age test online (example of test below). Despite an August 2010 launch date provided by ICANN, tweets^[3] were posted about mental age results going into early 2011. Most portrayed disbelief over their results, either being surprisingly young or surprisingly old.

Spread

Although internet users would share their mental age test results across social media throughout the early and mid-2010s, mass engagement with the website and the reference didn't surface en masse until the late 2010s. For instance, on December 11th, 2016, YouTuber Deji shared a video titled, "THE MENTAL AGE TEST," wherein, he took the test and reacted to his results. Over the course of six years, the video received roughly 1.3 million views (shown below).

On March 29th, 2019, Twitter^[5] user nutbrah tweeted their test results, earning over 600 likes in three years. Other tweets^[6] surfaced in 2020 that namedropped the test and subsequent results.

2022 Mental Age TikTok Trend

On February 14th, 2018, the YouTube channel BRIGHT SIDE posted a video titled, "A Color Test That Can Tell Your Mental Age," which earned roughly 40.9 million views over the course of four years (shown below).

This aforementioned video and its test process were used in TikTok content starting in 2022. For instance, on February 22nd, 2022, TikToker^[7] 6bala96dewa9 reposted BRIGHT SIDE's YouTube video, earning roughly 2,900 plays in five months (shown below, left). On April 17th, TikToker^[8] sambucha posted a video that also used BRIGHT SIDE's YouTube video, earning roughly 1.4 million plays and 74,900 likes in three months (shown below, right).

Plausibly inspired by sambucha's TikTok, other users on the platform started to research mental age tests online going into mid-2022. On July 5th, 2022, TikToker^[9] pollycastor posted a video that shared a current picture of her at age 19 juxtaposed with her test results being 32 years old. Over the course of one week, the video received roughly 2.3 million plays and 374,900 likes (shown below, left). The trend then spread going into the middle of the month. For instance, on July 7th, TikToker^[10] defnotlucaaa posted a video that earned roughly 408,900 plays and 73,100 likes in five days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References