A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia? | Hacker News Reader

A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?

nytimes.com

17 pointsabsconditus14 comments

I love the Wikipedia page. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test)

Check out the "Tester Projection" and "Validity" sections - it's a battleground of fact and counterfact, backed up by different references, each sentence disagreeing with the previous one.

Wikipedia was born to do this - it's why something like Britannica can never truly be relevant again. Thanks for posting it.

I didn't know that, but Rorschach tests can detect cancer (http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/reprint/48/8/549.pd...)

I love science :-)

Perhaps anyone who thinks anything will remain secret by convention is a fucking moron. It takes one person one minute to make something like this public forever. It takes the cooperation of thousands of people over thousands of weeks to keep it a secret. When we're dealing with something like... the password to launch a nuclear missile, it's reasonable to expect it to remain a secret (then again, thousands of people (hopefully) don't have access to things like that). With public domain information that thousands of people have access to, well... you'd be a fucking moron to think it could stay secret for long.

Perhaps tangential, but this is why security through obscurity is not enough. Sure, you can roll your own cryptography and no one will be able to break it... for a while. Eventually though, the secret of how it works will leak and then you're done. It's much better to focus on making something that will work despite being public.

I don't know if that idea CAN be applied to psychology. I don't know much about it. But I suspect some effort to make tests which can work even when public will be necessary in the future... assuming Rorschach's test ever worked.

excuse my language, but any psychologist who uses a rorschach test is a fucking moron.

My gut reaction agrees with you Naz, but care to elaborate a little too? You've always got a pretty insightful perspective on things.

Is there any validity to it? Too subjective? Gameable? It seems like junk to me, but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?

>but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?

You might want to rethink this statement.

but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?

No. It's possible for an unvalidated test to have no value at all and yet be used for decades.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=078796056X/

sure, there could possibly be some value to it if the administration of the test were done under more rigorous standards and the results compared against statistical correlations. I mean just common sense should tell you that the correct way to use it would be to have a distribution of common answers in front of you with correlation coefficients of the answers of people with various mental disorders.

when you look at the history of the test this is not how it has been used. psychologists use patient answers as the starting point for their own interpretation of that patient's problems. it is psychoanalysis quackery all over again. the hypothesis are always descriptive and never prescriptive. if your hypothesis makes no predictions about behavior what is the point? it certainly isn't helping the patient. the whole point of labeling mental disorders is so that you can group people by what treatments actually help them, not so psychologists can get more research grants.

The reason they SAY they are angry is because the test is subjective and open-ended and there has been about 100 years of research into the interpretation of the results.

It would be very hard to replace the plates with new ones and maintain the same properties of the originals.

The reason I think they are ACTUALLY angry is because they make money selling the plates/diagnostics. If they are online for free why would anyone buy them?

That's a bit tinfoil-ey. It's mostly practicing psychiatrists who are upset. Do you really think that many trained doctors have a side job selling pieces of paper with public-domain images on them to a market that can be measured in thousands of people?

Anyway, the quote at the bottom is a devastating takedown as far as I'm concerned:

>To illustrate his point, Dr. Heilman used the Snellen eye chart, which begins with a big letter E and is readily available on the Wikipedia site.

>If someone had previous knowledge of the eye chart," he said, "you can go to the car people, and you could recount the chart from memory. You could get into an accident. Should we take it down from Wikipedia?"

I agree that most psychiatrists dont make money of the plates, but some of the complaints come from the company that makes the plates. I wouldn't be surprised if the company is making this into a bigger deal than the psychiatrists would on their own.

This is also from the article: "Hogrefe licenses a number of companies in the United States to sell the plates along with interpretative material. One such distributor, Western Psychological Services, sells the plates themselves for $110 and a larger kit for $185."

"Trudi Finger, a spokeswoman for Hogrefe & Huber Publishing, the German company that bought an early publisher of Hermann Rorschach’s book, said in an e-mail message last week: “We are assessing legal steps against Wikimedia,” referring to the foundation that runs the Wikipedia sites."

I was expecting something along the lines of "A Rorschach Cheat Sheet: Literary Allusions in Watchmen" (or something). Interesting nonetheless. Do optometrists get upset with the color-blindness tests that are online? People could do the same with them (memorize them for the test).

As usual, Skepdic has a good page

http://www.skepdic.com/inkblot.html

on this unvalidated test, which I took when I was a kid.

Wow look at the number of references. This is a great example of controversy being a source of thoroughness in an open system like Wikipedia.

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