Handwriting analysis = cold reading?

For the purposes of this thread I’m talking about “recreational” handwriting analysis - I don’t know anything about the forensic kind or the kind I hear people use sometimes in hiring. Last night at our weekly wine tasting, the wine store guy had a handwriting analyst come in and analyze our handwriting for a lark. (Dad says next week we’ll have a fortune teller; our friend Tom says it’s going to be an organ grinder with a monkey instead.)

So, I was prepared for the classic “cold reading” tricks. In some ways, it did seem to match up - he told us a lot of stuff pretty fast, and I can’t remember half of it except that it kind of “seemed on target”, you know. There was one miss that I recall, “You’re pretty anal - I’m surprised you didn’t straighten this stack of paper”, which, well, he hasn’t seen my house obviously. But that’s the only “miss” I think he had. Of course, a lot of the statements were pretty vague, and some of them were repeated between the four of us who went. I mean, I think everybody probably has “something that’s bothering you that you haven’t done anything about.” Of course, my mind went immediately to my problems with D I’ve chronicled in a thread here, but that seemed like a statement that could apply to most people.

Some of it was pretty specific, though, or you could see it either way - “You love to read but you don’t get to read nearly as much as you’d like.” Well, not everybody’s a reader, but people who are readers never get to read as much as they’d like. I was the only one who got “You’re a good cook”, which in that crowd is pretty true. He also told me that I’m a take-charge kind of person, but that I’m very passive, which is unusual, so I probably do my best work when there’s somebody there to push me, which was so true I actually found it kind of enlightening.

He said I’m “very close to my parents”, and I told him, yeah, duh, you just did my mom before you did me, and he explained to me what in my signature indicated that - I connect my first name to my last name and do them the same size. I thought most people kind of did that?

So, my question is - cold reading? Legit science? Combination of both?

I atttended a lecture on graphology ,by a licensed psychologist who uses handwriting analysis with his patients.
He freely admitted that it is not science–it’s an art, and a talent that he uses alongside scientifically acceptable methods.

I also realized during his lecture that, like cold reading, a lot of it is plain common sense.Flamboyant people sign their names in larger letters, Artistic people add an underline or decoratative flourish. Confident people write the word “I” larger than other capital letters. Shy people do the opposite. etc.

I’ve done that all my life, and I left home at 15 and never looked back.

It’s mostly guesswork.

How “cold” was the reading. If he just observed all the people at the party, or just observed them standing in line he could have made some better guesses.

Well, it was fairly cold - no closed rooms or anything, but we arrived, were given numbers, and went over when called - we weren’t chatting right by him, he didn’t mingle with the crowd beforehand, and he was busy when we were waiting anyway.

It’s all (mostly) crap:

[quote]
[ul][li]Graphologists were unable to predict scores on the Eysenck personality questionnaire using writing samples from the same people (Furnham and Gunter, 1987)[/li]
[li]Graphologists were unable to predict scores on the Myers-Briggs test using writing samples from the same people (Bayne and O’Neill, 1988)[/li]
[li]Using meta-analysis drawn from over 200 studies, graphologists were generally unable to predict any kind of personality trait on any personality test, let alone predict job performance (Jennings, Amabile & Ross, 1992).[/ul][/li][/quote]

See also this article:

Let’s start with a useful and important distinction.

Handwriting analysis is a forensic science. It is chiefly used to establish, for example, whether two samples of handwriting (or signatures) are likely to have been written by the same person. It is rarely able to give certain, definitive answers, and there will always be an element of the work that is subjective and open to interpretation. Nonetheless, it is a true scientific discipline. Handwriting analysis makes no claims at all concerning personality or aptitude, only ‘similarity’ or ‘non similarity’.

Graphology is the supposed ability to discern personality traits and personal aptitudes from a sample of handwriting. There is no scientifically respectable reason why this should work, and no reliable, empirical evidence to substantiate any claim that it does work. Rational people are entitled to regard it as meaningless drivel.

It is the case that some graphologists take their ‘craft’ very seriously, consider it to be a highly developed science, and are sincere in their belief that it ‘works’. However, there is no evidence to suggest that they are anything but sincerely self-deluded.

It is also the case that some otherwise respectable organisations place a significant degree of trust in graphology, for example to assist with recruitment decisions. While this may give the graphologists themselves something to crow about (and some income), there is no reason to believe that graphological ‘analysis’ actually produces results any better than chance and educated guesswork, or that it confers any significant advantage on those organisations that place their faith in it.

Regarding the specifics of the OP, there is no easy way to determine whether the graphologist in question was using cold reading techniques. Maybe he was, and then again maybe he wasn’t. We don’t have any data to go on. It is certainly true that cold reading techniques can be used to give what seem like very convincing graphology ‘readings’, and I’ve demonstrated this many times. The snippets provided in the OP seem compatible with the ‘cold reading’ hypothesis, but that’s about all we can say.

But is graphology a legitimate science? Definitely not.

My handwriting varies so widely I don’t even recognize it some of the time. I sometimes find scraps of papers with notes written on it and have no idea if it was my note or somebody else’s.
I just find it hard to believe that most people are very consistent with their handwriting style, so I’m skeptical about the idea that handwriting analysts can very definitely match up two sample of handwriting or eliminate the possibility that they were written by the same person.

Check out the Master:
Is handwriting analysis legit science?
and
Handwriting Analyis Revisited: Are elements of personality revealed through handwriting?