Wikipedia Debates Rorschach Censorship

GigsVT writes "Editors on Wikipedia are engaged in an epic battle over a few piece of paper smeared with ink. The 10 inkblot images that form the classic Rorschach test have fallen into the public domain, and so including them on Wikipedia would seem to be a simple choice. However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test. Is the censorship of material appropriate, when the public exposure to that material may render it useless?"

Comments

I thought they..

[tmosley]

I thought they made those randomly. If there are only ten of them, that seems to indicate that there are a few certain "correct" answers, which kind of throws the whole test into doubt now, doesn't it?

Re:I thought they..

[omfglearntoplay]

I think the doubt thrown on the validity of the tests is all over the place anyway. Why not just let the tests out and end the debate there?

Re:I thought they..

[Anonymous Coward]

The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense. It's a cold reading in a phony clinical setting. The diagnoses is always "more costly therapy sessions".

This is like the association of soothsayers trying to supress the "secret" of tarot or tea leave reading, because if everybody knows it wont be magic anymore.

Re:I thought they..

[twidarkling]

The images are PD now, putting them on wikipedia won't change that. Beyond that, there have been layperson descriptions of what the test entails for years. Even knowing the test exists invalidates the results to at least a degree, since the person looking will try to say what they think the test-giver wants to hear. While THAT might be diagnostically useful, it's not the same as what the person actually sees.

Re:I thought they..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the point. It's not "scientific" in the sense of a physical experiment that gives concrete, objective results. You can't have a comprehensive objective quantification of someone's mental state, so you're not going to find a test like that anyways.

The purpose of this test is to collect data using a standardized set of inputs, so that the data can be meaningfully compared with other results of the same test. It's simply a tool used in the overall process, not a definitive standalone diagnosis.

Re:I thought they..

[hardburn]

Thread should end right here. While the Rorschach test does have some limited scientific validity, it doesn't deserve to be as widespread as it is. The test's "effectiveness" relies on exactly the same psychological blindspot that fortune telling does. Wikipedia isn't hampering the effectiveness of anything that isn't already broken.

Re:I thought they..

[david_thornley]

They also score things like whether you pick the card up

Okay, so what are the psychological differences caused by the fact that I can't see things lying on a desk as clearly as I could thirty years ago? Optometrists want to know!

Re:I thought they..

[InsertCleverUsername]

> > in order to interpret the results scientifically

> You have to be smoking dope.
> There is nothing scientific at all about this claptrap, and there never was.

Actually, speaking as someone who administered the Rorschach many times in a previous life (before turning to coding), I'd say you're wrong. It certainly doesn't have the psychometric characteristics of a good personality test, but it does have considerable empirical data to aid in its interpretation. It's nowhere near the validity and reliability of instruments like the MMPI or NEO PI-R, but it does have its uses --especially when assessing those who might try to fool a psychologist using these more face-valid psychological measures.

Re:I thought they..

[DragonWriter]

In fact, in many cases, it's far more rigorous than the "hard" sciences because it lacks a consistent mathematical model for what is being tested, and thus must rely wholly on experimental controls to establish fundamental principles.

If you don't have a consistent model of what is going on to test, you don't have a hypothesis and aren't doing science. Having a consistent model ("mathematical" or otherwise) does not obviate the need for experimental controls, in fact, its the only thing that is going to tell you what kind of experimental controls you are likely to need.

The (broad, and there are exceptions on both sides) difference between psychology (and social sciences in general) and physical sciences is not that the former lacks consistent models and the latter has them, or that the former uses experimental controls and the latter does not, it is that in the latter one can often use laboratory controls by tightly controlling the initial conditions, whereas in the former you are more often forced to resort to statistical controls.

Re:I thought they..

[ajs]

First off, let me be clear: I'm not saying that mathematical rigor isn't required in psychology. Certainly where math is required (e.g. for statistical modeling of behavior or when sampling a population or when describing the propagation of activity in the brain), it must be rigorous. This is not to be conflated with the lack of a mathematical basis for, and thus availability of proofs with respect to most of the field.

If you don't have a consistent model of what is going on to test

You'll note that that's not what I said. You dropped the word "mathematical" from my statement. Convenient, that.

you don't have a hypothesis and aren't doing science.

If you have a hypothesis (e.g. people who exhibit trait "a" will also exhibit trait "b"), then the fact that you don't understand how the brain works has no more bearing on the validity of the hypothesis than the fact that we have no model that explains how gravity and electromagnetism function in the same universe. I can still form a hypothesis and test it, even if I can't fathom how the two relate to each other.

Having a consistent model ("mathematical" or otherwise) does not obviate the need for experimental controls,

Which is entirely true. However, you can play fast-and-loose with controls in physics because you can fall back on math. Ask a physicist not to ignore second-order effects and he'll (or she'll) look at you like you have seventeen heads. It's absurd. They wash out in the math. Well, there's little math that can describe the behavior of human beings because we're an emergent phenomenon from underlying, complex systems that are not yet fully understood. Thus there is not consistent math.

That doesn't mean that we can't perform experimentation and build a body of knowledge. Nor does it mean that that body of knowledge is somehow non-scientific.

It's hard to isolate experimental evidence from math when they're tightly entwined in many sciences, but they're not actually the same thing, and bother us though it might, math isn't a science. Rather, like the related field of logic, math is a tool which science employs. When that tool is rendered less valuable in a given scenario, that doesn't mean that you can't perform good science. It does, however, make that science harder.

Re:I thought they..

[ajs]

Really? And what double-blind study shows this?

There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.

Snarkiness aside, you'll be glad to know that psychological researchers don't get published without valid experimentation (that's a broad statement, and just as with physics, there are sad exceptions... but on the whole it's roughly correct in both fields). You're conflating pop-psych and psychoanalysis with psychology. Don't do that or I'll start explaining to you that physics is all nonsense based on my viewing of the most recent Transformers film.

Re:I thought they..

[MaskedSlacker]

The Rorschach test is a holdover from the bad old days of psychology when it was little more scientific than alchemy was in its day.

There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.

What the hell was this supposed to mean? His whole point was that there are no double-blind studies supporting your point. Turning around and saying double-blinds are important is not a retort.

Modern psychology is rather different from psychology in the first part of the 20th century. The Rorscach belongs firmly in the latter.

Re:I thought they..

[MaskedSlacker]

Your post more or less sums up my point: the Rorschach test is unscientific, as much so as alchemy or astrology.

It is not a test that has epistemological or methodological roots in science. Its roots come from the Freud school of 'making things up and calling them true.'

Contrast this with the modern study of psychology which relies on statistically rigorous experiments with proper methodology.

Abstract observation, including Freudian or Jungian introspection, has been discredited because it is of questionable validity, reliability, and (most importantly) falsifiability.

Public Domain Man

[MightyMartian]

If they're in the public domain, then they're in the public domain, and that ends it. I'm sure the APA can come up with some new, copyrighted ink blot tests. Perhaps they could involve images of Tom Cruise and L. Ron Hubbard in various disturbing poses.

Suggested reading

[greg1104]

It seems that the APA is the latest group that needs to do some reading on why security through obscurity just doesn't work.

Clearly they should be omitted from wikipedia...

[damn_registrars]

... because if they aren't on wikipedia, then nobody will ever find them on the internet and the images will be safe forever!

Re:Are the images important?

[camperdave]

I'm surprised that there's only ten images (and that they haven't changed over the years). I don't know the history of the test, and I am by no means a psychologist or psychiatrist, however I suspect it would work something like this:

1. Get a series of inkblots together
2. Gather and correlate data on how healthy people describe blots
3. Gather and correlate data on how people with known problems describe blots
4. Show inkblots to patients
5. See how their results line up with previous correlations
6. ???
7. profit

My Psyc Professor Already Invalidated Them

[scorp1us]

Back in college, my psyc prof spent some time going over those "personality" screenings and directly told us how to pass. He in effect, gave us the answer key (for those of us taking notes) on how to present ourselves via test results. His statements about how the scoring is done already invalidated the test. He also covered multi-colored ink blots and told us how to handle those too.

But despite what I know, every time I see an ink blot, I think "ink blot, symmetrical about [X,Y] axis." What's that make me? I don't see anything. Just ink on folded paper. I've stared at these things and my answer never changes. because you know, its still an ink blot.

Re:Scoring

[mysidia]

No, you'd be showing contempt for the test due to a deep-seated fixation with test-avoidance, probably arising from a bad childhood experience with a psychoanalyst, causing you to try to make a fool out of people who want to help you, clearly an anti-social tendency.