Is there any credence given to The Rorschach Test?
I’ll wait to post my tangential trivia joke about Rorschach tests until after some people with real answers show up.
There was a very good article in Scientific American debunking it, here’s the cite:
“What’s Wrong with This Picture?” Scientific American, May 2001
I note that the Skeptic’s Dictionary also has a cite for it as well as other articles.
As best, it can be viewed as a “distraction” mechanism so the analyst can get some basic info about the patient’s world view. I.e., for a given ink blot no one answer will provide specific information.
Is it just me or does rorschach osrt of look like brad pitt?
http://www.stangl-taller.at/TESTEXPERIMENT/testbsprorschach.html
His pics at the bottom
William Poundstone covered the Rorschach Test in one of his Big Secrets books. Apparently, the usefulness of this test has been the subject of debate for quite a while now, and many psychologists have decided that it’s worthless.
Sorry about the hijack lol, but every psych class I’ve ever had has basically said the whole premise is bull. Its all a little too subjective for my tastes.
It is derived from the Freudian school of psychology and it is and out of date by about 70 years. I do not know of any modern theory that supports it and I have no idea why it is still given at all. It is a dinosaur that is a disgrace to modern psychology.
I had the Rorschach Test doen on me, and the results were quite accurate. It even found out characterisitcs about my personality which I hade hidden quite well. The same was the opinion of my friend (we were subjects for a PhD student). I used to be sceptic the Rorschach test, but not any more. At least I don’t believe that it’s compelete bull.
Right, but how much information about yourself were you given? Astrologists and psychics are known to give people results that seem uncanny but that is known to be a sham. I studied psychometrics in both undergrad and grad school and the consensus was that the Rorschach was never valid and while we touched on it, our professors never gave it much credibility at all.
Well, the reason the test probably “worked” for you is simple. You had opened up to the person giving the test, and probably revealed a lot more about yourself than you thought. Also, parts of your personality that you feel are “hidden quite well” may be totally obvious to everyone else - they just don’t comment on it. (Can you imagne that conversation…“Bill, can you pass the salt, and have I mentioned that you seem like you have a fear of commitment possibly steming from abondonment issues surrounding your mother?”)
Really, what you see in a blob is not particularly significant - unless of course in every blob you see horrible scenes of people being decapitated - that might give cause for concern… 
There is also something called the “Barnum Effect.” Basically people will accept vague, generalized descriptions of the type provided by personality profiles, horoscopes, palm readings, etc., if they are given trappings suggesting that they are individualized.
Right, then!
This goes in the category of “jokes you didn’t get until years later.”
Beverhilly Hillbillies. They’ve got Jethro in for some sort of psych testing. One shrink is talking to another one about Jethro’s responses to the Rorschach test, which Jethro saw as all being pictures of food.
Shrink #1: So, first of all, you know what these are all really pictures of, right?
Shrink #2: Sure. Naked women.
Shrink #1: Right. Anyway…
Fast forward oh, ten, fifteen years to Psych 101 class when they’re talking about the Rorschach test…
:dubious: :eek: :smack:
So what about the test in which one is shown a picture (like that of a man fishing with a youth) and asked what is happening in the picture? Is that a valid test?
“They’re waiting for the Loch Ness Monster.”
Peace.
Believe it or not, there are still folks in positions of power in higher education who believe in the validity of Rorschach tests.
My SIL is a PhD doing her post-doc internship at a major CA university. She has a superior (term used very loosely) who just drools for those inkblots. This person has one in particular that s/he swears by- if you see the blot one way, you are straight, another way, you are gay. There is no dissuading this person from their POV.
Pretty sad. And difficult to work under!
Shrink, “Your answers are all sexual in nature, are you obsessed?”
Patient, "Look who’s talking, you’re the one with the stack of dirty pictures.)
From an episode of Get Smart I think.
I remember when I was a psych undergrad, a really fun lecturer warning us about probability and statistics and how they can be miss-used. His example was a piece of research that came out statistically significant (and was published in the American Journal of Behaviour Psych - a reputable journal) but the underlying hypothesis was idiotic: people who see frogs in the Rorschach inkblots think that you can get pregnant orally!
I can see that, although the inkblots have no validity or reliability, as someone has already mentioned, they could be revealing of personality issues, should the counsellor/psychologist etc ask good questions. Linking in with learning development theory, visual learners may find this an easier way to self-disclose than other type learners? Just guessing.
My ex-best friend is a psychologist and when she was working on her PsyD she went through agony studying Rorschach. I made some remarks about how those looked like bunk and she explained that it’s really a very tool for indicating blah blah blah. But extremely difficult to learn, very complicated.
In short, real psychologists do use the Rorschach tests, and it’s apparently a lot more complicated than what laypeople might think.
Information about the supposed ability of the Rorschach test to determine sexual orientation:
The third inkblot is claimed to be able to determine sexual orientation. There are two figures in the inkblot. Each has ‘breasts’ and a ‘penis’. Regardless of their gender, heterosexuals reputedly notice the penis and describe the figures as male. Homosexuals of both genders reputedly notice the breasts and describe the figures as female. Of course, many straight people notice the breasts, and many gay people notice the penis. I would imagine that individuals are substantially more likely to notice the breasts than they are to actually be gay.
I’ve put this in a spoiler box because any knowledge of how the test works will disqualify you for taking it. So will clicking on this link, which describes each inkblot using a replica image. If the images don’t load, you’ll need to turn off your firewall.
That being said, most psychologists now do not believe the test is valid, especially not with the original set of interpretations. They seem to be very Freudian, and thus are highly questionable.
[Tangent mini-rant]God damnit, here I am at the University of Colorado, supposedly getting a BA in one of the pre-eminent Bio/Neuro/Cognitive/Behavioral Genetic programs in the country, and my Psychopathology instructor is a brand new Ph.D. from U. Penn that’s basically a “neo-Freudian.” When we went over the Rorschach test in class, she claimed that novel interpretations of the test such as what proportion of the graphic the person interprets goes back to correlate with a number of clear, valid psychological dimensions. Of course when I asked much handwaving of “studies that I don’t have right now,” and, “I can’t tell you exactly so that I won’t bias you if you ever need to take the test,” she never really pinned down how to interpret the test. Maybe she was BS’ing.[/Tangent mini-rant]
Huh, guess I must be gay. Or maybe I’m just not sexually attracted to men who wear high heels and have their penis growing out of their knees.