Are You Someone's Ick?

You know about your icks — the things other people do that make your attraction evaporate in an instant. The loud chewers, the double texters, the people who clap when the plane lands. But here is the question nobody wants to ask: what if you are someone else's ick? What if the way you laugh, eat, or tell a story is making someone across the table quietly lose interest? A 2025 study by Collisson, Saunders, and Yin¹ found that 64% of single adults have experienced the ick — and that personality and behavioral triggers outweigh physical appearance as causes. The behaviors that trigger icks are often minor, unconscious, and completely invisible to the person doing them.

This test flips the lens. Instead of evaluating other people's icks, you will answer 25 scenario-based questions about your own habits, social behaviors, and self-presentation. Answer honestly — the test works best when you do not try to guess the "right" response. Your results will place you in one of six ick-generating profiles and show you exactly where you fall on the ick-triggering spectrum.

The concept of "the ick" may seem like a TikTok invention, but the psychological mechanism behind it has deep roots in evolutionary psychology. Collisson, Saunders, and Yin¹, in their paper "The ick: Disgust sensitivity, narcissism, and perfectionism in mate choice thresholds," define the ick as a sudden and visceral aversion to a romantic partner triggered by behaviors or characteristics that superficially signal incompatibility or low mate quality. Their research connects the ick to the concept of mate choice thresholds — the personal standards each person holds for partner acceptability. When a behavior appears to fall below that threshold, rejection can be swift and emotionally intense.

What makes the ick psychologically interesting is that it operates largely outside conscious reasoning. The triggers are not typically serious character flaws. Collisson and colleagues' pilot analysis of popular TikTok videos with the hashtag #theick found that physical appearance accounted for only 6% of ick triggers. The most common triggers for women were behaviors perceived as overly feminine, publicly embarrassing behavior, and annoying speech patterns. For men, the top triggers included being perceived as overly trendy, publicly embarrassing behavior, and annoying speech. The pattern suggests that ick triggers are fundamentally about social presentation — how someone performs their identity in public — rather than about fixed traits.

The Collisson team identified three personality traits that predict ick likelihood. Disgust sensitivity — the tendency to feel revulsion toward germs, bodily fluids, and contamination — was associated with both the likelihood and frequency of experiencing the ick. People with higher disgust sensitivity appear to have a more sensitive detection system for behavioral "contamination," though this sensitivity is selective rather than universal. Grandiose narcissism correlated with the likelihood of experiencing the ick but not its frequency, suggesting that narcissistic individuals react strongly when specific perceived flaws threaten their self-image but are not constantly dissatisfied. Perfectionism — specifically other-oriented perfectionism, the tendency to hold rigid standards for other people — was associated with both likelihood and frequency, indicating that perfectionistic individuals experience the ick more often across more contexts. Giulia Zoppolat, a social psychologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center, connects the ick to the broader phenomenon of romantic ambivalence. Her work suggests that ambivalence in relationships — feeling simultaneously attracted to and repelled by a partner — serves an adaptive purpose. It signals that something in the relationship deserves closer evaluation. The ick, in this framing, is not necessarily a terminal signal; it is a prompt to pay attention.

Rosier², in the Virginia Social Science Journal, examined how TikTok shaped Gen Z's understanding of dating rejection. The research found that the platform created a positive feedback loop: users share ick experiences, those experiences are validated through engagement, and the threshold for what constitutes an ick gradually lowers. Rosier linked the popularity of ick culture to broader trends toward dismissive attachment — the prioritization of emotional independence over vulnerability. From this perspective, the ick may function as a socially acceptable mechanism for disengaging when intimacy begins to feel threatening. The counter-movement is equally revealing. The dating app Plenty of Fish found that 36% of daters do not view icks as dealbreakers and have chosen to push past them, a behavior the platform labeled "stICKing." Clinical psychologist Naomi Bernstein notes that ick responses often reflect the observer's own fears of intimacy rather than genuine incompatibility. The distinction matters: a reflexive ick response to nervousness, imperfection, or vulnerability may be screening out exactly the kind of authenticity that sustains long-term relationships.

This test assesses your ick-generating profile by presenting everyday behavioral scenarios and measuring how you respond across six dimensions: self-awareness of social presentation, behavioral adjustment patterns, comfort with imperfection, social performance anxiety, quirk concealment versus display, and tolerance for judgment. Your responses are scored against a normed sample to produce percentile rankings showing how your behavioral patterns compare to the broader population. The resulting profile — from Blissfully Unaware to Ick Magnifier — reflects not a fixed personality type but a current behavioral pattern that can shift with awareness and context.

Your ick-generating profile has real implications for how you navigate dating and relationships. If you score as a Self-Conscious Adjuster, you may be investing more energy in ick avoidance than the situation warrants — and the resulting rigidity may be more off-putting than the behaviors you are trying to suppress. If you score as Blissfully Unaware, you may benefit from a single honest conversation with a trusted friend about your most prominent habits. If you score as an Ick Embracer, you are likely already filtering effectively, but it is worth examining whether you are also filtering out people who would challenge you in productive ways. The goal is not to eliminate all ick-triggering behaviors — that is neither possible nor desirable — but to understand where on the spectrum you fall and what that means for the kinds of relationships you attract.

Footnotes

1. Collisson, B., Saunders, E., & Yin, C. (2025). The ick: Disgust sensitivity, narcissism, and perfectionism in mate choice thresholds. Personality and Individual Differences, 238, 113086. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2025.113086 ↩ ↩²

2. Rosier, J. G. (2024). Getting the Ick is Giving Me the Ick: An Examination of How the Trendy Joke Went Viral and is Impacting Gen Z Dating Culture. Virginia Social Science Journal, 57. ↩