Is handwriting analysis legit science?
I find this pretty hard to believe, unless it just means that employers discount applicants because of sloppy penmanship. Has anybody here experienced this first hand?
That sentence gave me pause, too, although the ‘estimated’ gives some wiggle room, down to say, .0001%.
I have personally never experienced it. Of course, a company probably wouldn’t tell you, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never had to give any handwritten anything to a company as part of the appication process.
5 to 10 percent is a low percentage. I would guess 5 to 10 percent of companies do a bunch of other silly things like giving personality tests to perspective employees. It is the 70% for France that really give me pause.
Back in the early '90’s, I know the Olsten corporation did it for management applicants.
This makes a certain amount of sense, but Cecil had to get his number from somewhere. I am curious who said it.
Some companies did use “graphology” tests to try to judge a person’s honesty, reliability, etc. based on handwriting. I’m not sure if any companies do it any more, since it’s pretty much known to be bullshi-- ah, unreliable.
Okay, C K Dexter Haven, I think you said pretty much the same thing that Cecil did, so do you have a cite?
From Managing Human Resources by Wayne F. Cascio (McGraw Hill Irwin, 6th edition, 2003) on page 249:
I have been asked to submit handwriting samples twice - once in the mid-70’s for a grocery store, and once in the mid-90’s for Olsten - and I was not management.
Oooh, good cite, Dex. The business world will never cease to amaze me. 
I prolly shoulda said that the Cascio text is one of the outstanding textbooks on Human Resources, used in many of business schools. He’s pretty reliable on business practices, and footnotes most of his statements pretty extensively.
I can attest that the French are fairly obsessive about penmanship and have a fetish for expensive pens.
This figure wouldn’t surprise me. It’s well known in France that a lot of companies use graphology to sort out the applicants. Very few people here are in any way aware that graphology is junk science. All employers request a hand-written letter of application (though not necessarily all of them use graphology). On the overall it’s a rather standard procedure.
I think though that 70% is a bit too much, since many companies (and particulary little employers) probably won’t/can’t hire a graphologist.
Certainly- graphology is a worthwhile hiring tool- assuming for some reason you need some dude with neat penmanship. :rolleyes:
A further interesting statistic. There have been thousands of studies done on the prediction of job performance, and F. L. Schmidt and J. E. Hunter, writing “The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theortical implications of 85 years of research findings” in Psychological Bulletin, 124, (1998), on p. 265, show a table that shows the validity of job predictors. Validity is expressed as a coefficient of corelation (“R” to statisticians), ranging from -1 to 1. A coefficient of +1 would mean there was 100% correlation; a coefficient of 0 would mean there was no correlation.
A few selections from the top and bottom of that table:
General mental ability tests: .51
Work sample test: .54
Integrity tests: .41
Structured employment interviews: .51
Unstructured employment interviews: .38
Job knowledge tests: .48
Etc…
Reference checks: .18
Years of education: .10
Graphology: .02
Age: -.01
Point made?
Above, CKDH cites a book that cites Levy (1979, Dun’s Review). I googled and found a second document that cites Levy:
http://www.dbe-online.com/files/psychological_bulletin.doc
But after a cursory 30-second search, I did not find Levy’s 1979 article in Dun’s Review; where did he come up with France and 85%?
Yes, the French are goofy, but this goofy??