What is the “Rorschach Test”? Call me “unstreetsmart”, but, I seriously didn’t know what it was when I started writing this entry

. So, I did what I had to for almost anything that ever crossed my mind curiously: I googled it. What I found out though was pretty interesting. It is a test that is used in a large scale to “examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning”. The test is also believed to “detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly”. Curious to find out what it was all about, and excited to discover anything unusual I might be unknowingly carrying, I took the test online. You can imagine my utter shock when the test evaluated my “sickness quotient” to be 82%.

Before I express my concerns about the validity of the test, let us first summarize the two sides of the debate that has been going on since Wikipedia published the Rorschach plates online with a set of the most common responses to the test in 2009. Wikipedia is well known for its openness in the internet culture. Anyone can contribute to, and anyone can edit its contents. Publishing the Rorschach test plates and the most common answers that renders a person to be normal could invalidate the test conduct itself. This is what the debate is about. According to an NY Times article, psychologists oppose the availability of the test materials to the general public because they think that anyone could memorize the normal responses to the test, and therefore, cheat on the test. It therefore makes the very purpose of the test “meaningless”, especially for patients who are “reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly”. Experts think that the test will lose its effectiveness if people who take it already have information about the answers and the scoring system. They see it as an “equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT” (Cohen). On the other hand, there are people who advocates for this action of Wikipedia’s. These are mostly the contributors of Wikipedia who believe in the openness of the internet and above all, science. They do not believe that psychological research could be interrupted by publishing the test materials online. There are also expert voices that advocate for the openness of scientific research. Opinions on the affirmative side of this controversy includes one of an emergency-room-doctor’s, Dr. James Heilman, who thinks that if anyone wants to cheat the test, they can cheat it, but, publishing it online does not harm the test or theoretically make it invalid.

Also, there are broader societal issues that this incident addresses. The new revolution concerning freedom of speech or freedom of information can result in consequences that are not always favorable. Still, the ideology of freedom of information no matter what amongst neo-modernist citizens of the internet sustains to make a lot of things worse than they already are.

If I am to choose a side, I would say that I do not see any harm being done by making the Rorschach test plates available to public. Why? The reason is two-fold. First of all, the plates have been there for ages. They are available in a number of miscellaneous websites, but “it was not until they showed up on the popular Wikipedia site that psychologists became concerned” (Cohen). So, if there was a problem with the test plates being available to public, a voice should have been raised earlier. Secondly, I do not think that the test is very interpretative of “underlying thought disorders” at all. For one thing, it gave me more of a shocking kind of information. Here is what I found out about myself taking the Rorschach test online in a website called “theinkblot.com”:

Test Results

Sickness Quotient: 82%
Your "Sickness Quotient" of 82% is definitely something to worry about.

Detailed Diagnosis

Interpersonal Insights
You never give up and refuse to settle for less than the best. In other words, you're impossible to please and you never shut up. You have trouble being friendly to others, especially people who hate your guts and want to hurt you.

Job Performance & Attitude
You have little empathy for anyone more successful at work than you, which is pretty much everyone. You aspire to becoming the CEO of a large, powerful company. This is unlikely since you rarely leave your parent's basement.

Personality Insight
Your personal motto is "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission." And you would certainly know.
This result is absurd, considering the fact that it does not depict me at all, and an 82% sickness quotient is definitely, as they say, “something to worry about”.

Staying unworried in a situation like this is quite difficult, so, I re-googled about the general acceptance of the results of the Rorschach test, and found a scholarly article that gave me some peace of mind. In this article, author James N. Butcher from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, discusses personality assessment methods over the ages, and specifically addresses the potential flaws of the Rorschach inkblot test:

The Rorschach has also been criticized as an instrument that overpathologizes people (Wood et al. 2001). The norms have been criticized as characterizing test takers, even normal individuals, as having emotional problems (Shaffer et al. 1999). This situation is considered to result in excessive false positives.
The article does not vote for a particular side of the debate concerning making the Rorschach plates public. It concludes the notion by signalling the need for further research and more time to see the real impact on test takers with prior information about the test. This implies that my assumption about the Rorschach inkblot tests rendering false results is not hundred percent of a fantasy. Alas! I am not crazy!

But, not yet! I am not going to say that the inkblot test is inconclusive based on the test results of some phony website. The Rorschach test seems invalid or not so efficient to me because I am just another person, not a psychologist or an expert in this. Of course, it is not invalid, and it has its own method of interpretation. I went through the plate images in the Wikipedia page, and also read the common responses before taking the online test. I could make no sense out of it since most of the common responses did not seem common to me at all. I tried my best during the test to find even a small similarity between what I honestly think about the images and what the common responses are, but I failed pathetically. I was not even close. The professional psychologists worry that, when in amateur hands, the test could give meaningless results. This does not seem to make sense at all. In stead, it is the exact opposite: because the general public does not have any relative education on the robust methodology that the Rorschach test follows, it is not very easy to completely fool such an old personality assessment instrument just by having a casual look at it. This is exactly why I think that no harm is being done to scientific research in this case. But, freedom of speech, or freedom of information, if held absolute and above the welfare of the society, may lead to negative consequences. That being said, it is probably only helpful to people who want to cheat the system anyway. Regular people cannot really make much out of it.

Similar thoughts are voiced in another scholarly article authored by Bruce L. Smith PhD, public affairs director of the Society for Personality Assessment (SPA). In his writing, the author explains how the absolutism of freedom of information could lead to national security disasters like terrorist attacks in a country. The author reinforces the need to “balance the potential benefit of informing the public against the potential harm to those who may be affected by such exposure” (13). The article concludes by stressing on the necessity to maintain the required level of security of sensitive psychological tools: “I do think that the greater risk is to other psychological instruments, the publication of which might seriously damage their validity (e.g., most intelligence scales). Fortunately, most of these are protected by copyright” (13).

Looking back to where we started, it is the same old battle of what you want to do and what you should do. Smart or not, good or evil, every normal person has the ability to judge something as beneficial or harmful. We do not just vandalize our own beautifully tended garden because we will not have to pay for property damage. Similarly, it is not wise to take the ideology of freedom of information to such a level where conserving it means ignoring all possible social impacts, positive or negative, that it may have. The rule of thumb should be to follow our guts; if it’s wrong, it feels wrong for a reason.


Works Cited

Butcher, James N. "Personality Assessment from the Nineteenth to the Early Twenty- First Century: Past Achievements and Contemporary Challenges." Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 1st ser. 6.1 (2010): 1-20. Google Scholar. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.

Cohen, Noam. "A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?" The New York Times 29 July 2009, New York ed.: A1. http://www.nytimes.com. 28 July 2009. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.

Online Rorschach Test. http://theinkblot.com. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.
"Rorschach Test." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.

Smith, Bruce L. "The Rorschach–Wikipedia Controversy." SPA Exchage 22.1 (2010): 7+. Google Scholar. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.