The Rorschach has been exposed. Is it dying?
The New York Times recently staged the Wikipedia-Rorschach debate that's been going on at least since June, when emergency room doctor James Heilman posted all 10 ink blots on Wikipedia, along with the most frequent form responses. Heilman says that restricting this information from the public domain would be akin to "the Chinese government's attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre," according to The Times.
Technically, Heilman has a point. The Rorschach material is no longer protected under copyright law, because the copyright has expired. And, Heilman is not bound by the APA code of ethics, which requires that psychologists "make reasonable efforts to maintain the integrity and security of test materials." After all, he is not a psychologist (I don't think), just a person, like many of us, who can buy a set of the inkblots from one of its distributors for $100 to $200. (Some restrictions do apply. Western Psychological Services, for instance, requires that people who buy the test from them have a Masters degree in psychology or a related field, but not necessarily a license to practice.)
There are other reasons to cool the hysteria we might feel about the disclosure of a reliable psychological tool. On the scary side, of course, Wikipedia does give away a couple "clues" that might help test-takers skew or at least invalidate their scores. For instance, Wikipedia reports that psychologists monitor for an appropriate number of responses to each ink blot, for the organization of responses, for complexity, and for references to the human figure. But "organization" and "complexity" are technical words to people who score the test, and vague descriptions to people reading the Wikipedia entry. Indeed, it takes years of training to learn the nuance of scoring a Rorschach. If the "answers" to receiving a certain score were so simple that they could be listed in a Wikipedia entry, psychologists would not need years of testing classes before they earned their degrees.
To put it another way, there's a richness to every Rorschach response that's akin to the richness of any sentence someone speaks in a therapist's office. It's our job as clinicians to interpret and not just score the thing. As Alvin Burstein from the University of Tennessee says in the NYT article, "The process of making sense of one's experience is gratifying. To take Rorschach's test is to make sense of ambiguity in the context of someone who is interested in how you do that."
Also, there's the issue that projective responses are pretty hard to fake. It's hard, for instance, for an anxious woman to "act convincingly calm" during a test. (I use that example to obscure what I want to say, to give a more specific example of how one could or could not "cheat" the test. I feel bound by the code of ethics!) But it's certainly hard for a psychotic person to decide not to give psychotic answers.
That said, I am surprised the ink blots haven't been so widely exposed until now. And I do think it's very sad--that the thrill of exposure here threatens to render a helpful tool, which took years to build, less helpful. I feel like someone's spat graffiti on the Mona Lisa, or crapped on the Museum steps.
The New York Times recently staged the Wikipedia-Rorschach debate that's been going on at least since June, when emergency room doctor James Heilman posted all 10 ink blots on Wikipedia, along with the most frequent form responses. Heilman says that restricting this information from the public domain would be akin to "the Chinese government's attempt to control information about the Tiananmen massacre," according to The Times.
Technically, Heilman has a point. The Rorschach material is no longer protected under copyright law, because the copyright has expired. And, Heilman is not bound by the APA code of ethics, which requires that psychologists "make reasonable efforts to maintain the integrity and security of test materials." After all, he is not a psychologist (I don't think), just a person, like many of us, who can buy a set of the inkblots from one of its distributors for $100 to $200. (Some restrictions do apply. Western Psychological Services, for instance, requires that people who buy the test from them have a Masters degree in psychology or a related field, but not necessarily a license to practice.)
There are other reasons to cool the hysteria we might feel about the disclosure of a reliable psychological tool. On the scary side, of course, Wikipedia does give away a couple "clues" that might help test-takers skew or at least invalidate their scores. For instance, Wikipedia reports that psychologists monitor for an appropriate number of responses to each ink blot, for the organization of responses, for complexity, and for references to the human figure. But "organization" and "complexity" are technical words to people who score the test, and vague descriptions to people reading the Wikipedia entry. Indeed, it takes years of training to learn the nuance of scoring a Rorschach. If the "answers" to receiving a certain score were so simple that they could be listed in a Wikipedia entry, psychologists would not need years of testing classes before they earned their degrees.
To put it another way, there's a richness to every Rorschach response that's akin to the richness of any sentence someone speaks in a therapist's office. It's our job as clinicians to interpret and not just score the thing. As Alvin Burstein from the University of Tennessee says in the NYT article, "The process of making sense of one's experience is gratifying. To take Rorschach's test is to make sense of ambiguity in the context of someone who is interested in how you do that."
Also, there's the issue that projective responses are pretty hard to fake. It's hard, for instance, for an anxious woman to "act convincingly calm" during a test. (I use that example to obscure what I want to say, to give a more specific example of how one could or could not "cheat" the test. I feel bound by the code of ethics!) But it's certainly hard for a psychotic person to decide not to give psychotic answers.
That said, I am surprised the ink blots haven't been so widely exposed until now. And I do think it's very sad--that the thrill of exposure here threatens to render a helpful tool, which took years to build, less helpful. I feel like someone's spat graffiti on the Mona Lisa, or crapped on the Museum steps.
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