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Dinner guests answer Proust questions
The rewrite
The original questionnaire runs around 35 questions. One host rewrote it and added questions of her own, kept simple and a little silly, so that any answer works and each one can lead into something else.
The questions
Questions in this vein ask what a person likes most and least in a person, when and where they were happiest, and on what occasion they lie. They ask whether life is long or short, what a person's favorite idea of happiness is, and what they fear most in life.
Guests enjoy it because they are being interviewed, and the questions draw out their deeper, ingrained thoughts.
Where did the Proust Questionnaire come from?
The questionnaire began as a Victorian parlor game, recorded in books called confession albums. Marcel Proust answered one as a teenager in the 1880s, and the answers surfaced in the twentieth century, which gave the questionnaire his name. French broadcaster Bernard Pivot ended his television programs with questions drawn from it. Vanity Fair has run a version of it on its back page since 1993.
Why do people enjoy talking about themselves?
In a 2012 study by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell at Harvard, brain scans showed that talking about oneself activates reward regions, including the nucleus accumbens. The same circuitry responds to food and money. In a follow-up task, participants gave up a small amount of money to answer questions about themselves rather than about others.
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