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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?"
I can hardly see how debunking what is in essence a subtle placebo as something that is unethical. In by that same stretch, debunking magic would be unethical. Pretty lame really. It's something almost 100 years old. For it to be phased out now due to there being far more accurate psychoanalysis is a good thing.
There aren't 'correct' answers to the blots, they are images that one uses to project their beliefs and subconscious on.
The idea is that you won't see them in nature, or anywhere else...but being that the test has been studied, validated and correlated across thousands of individuals, there is a LOT of predictive nature to them. Look at it and tell me what you think of it...I think bunny wabits...ok, 90% of the people that saw this and gave that response grew up to be serial killers.
I'm not a Freudian by any means...I have never given this exam and really don't see the point in doing so...but I have a background in psychometrics. Letting folks get access to this stuff means that more people will be exposed and the more exposure, along with people putting out statistics about what things mean lowers the validity of the exam.
But, if ruining a reliable therapeutic technique for others is worth while, by all means, go ahead and publish the images...its not like they are that hard to come by anyways...no one checks licenses these days if you are ordering most exams these days...
Where is my face!?!??!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I used to edit Wikipedia a lot, and during that time, I saw a lot of these debates. This is nothing new, just a heated debate over whether to include an image (in this case the Rorschach test images) based upon ethics and Wikipedia policy (which there is actually very little).
/. index, there have been many other and similar debates like it, many having much larger implications concerning censorship on Wikipedia by recommendation of a 3rd party organization.
Essentially what will happen (or has already happened, I didn't read the whole debate), is that the definition of "consensus" will be called into question, as that's what runs Wikipedia, and is what decides these debates. However, the Wikipedia policy of consensus is so vague and non-standardized that many debates like this end without consensus, and can even escalate into an edit war, followed by admins having to step in. (which is one of the reasons why I no longer edit it)
I really don't see why this specific debate made it on the
July the 14th. Nerd carcass in the toilet, head stuck in the bowl. This place is afraid of me. I shit on its true face. The corridors are infested with loserboys and the putrid smell of their feces-encrusted pants soil the very air as I twist their arms out of their sockets. The accumulated filth of all their fapping to kiddie scat porn will foam at their waist and all the stupid geeks and nerds will scream "save us!"... ... And I'll whisper "fuck you, loserboys." And then I'll beat them up and shit on their faces.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Incorrect. There actually ARE correct answers to the inkblots - no quotes necessary around that 'correct'. The correctness is assigned a number which aggregates over the course of all the blots and assigns a statistical analysis of the level of pathology of the patients psyche. It's actually very robust scientifically and leaves no room for psychological interpretation and is comparable to recall, spelling, or reverse counting tests.
Rorschach inkblots are not used for projection - on TV they are however. In real life, projection is used as an evaluative tool using a different kind of test. The projective test involves pictures with a very open setup and the patient is allowed to fill in the circumstances of the picture. For instance, one image can be of 3 people sitting around a table with a tree outside, the patient then can fill in what they believe to be occurring, what the characters are saying etc.
I've taken this "test," years ago. From that point of view it was an invitation to free association - whether you want to call that "projection" or not. You're saying that from the POV of the test giver my free associations were being scored on a scale of correctness, such that my response to each blot was reduced to a single number? Then you put the numbers together and are able to produce another number which purportedly rates the sickness of my mind?
Talk about sick minds! The narcissism of the practitioner who can bring himself to believe that free associations on abstract blots can be assigned a numerable degree of "correctness," and that he possesses the secret "scientific" means for doing that, is astonishing. And the implicit premise, that all correctly functioning minds perform the same, and so predictably will make the same "correct" free associations when presented with the same abstract blots ... if we're truly wired that deterministicly, then we should also be able to discern the "correct" reaction to any particular Jackson Pollock painting. Just put a dozen people certified as mentally non-pathological by virtue of giving 100% correct ink-blot associations in front of the painting, and voila, they should all have the same, entirely healthy reaction to the Pollock too.
Anyone who sees it any other way must simply be sick!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"Incorrect. There actually ARE correct answers to the inkblots"
There are RARELY correct or incorrect answers on ANY psychometric exam.
We take the results and score them...sometimes one answer means one thing, sometimes it means another, sometimes it is there for a baseline, sometimes it is there just to prepare the next version of the exam.
As for projective test, do you understand what a projective test is? It is one where you project your beliefs onto an abstract stimulus and come up with the result on your own as opposed to being told Hey It Might Be One Of These...there are quite a few projective tests out there. It is a common name and not just a single tool.
Whadda I know...I just sit in my office designing / validating psychologically sound tests all day...
Are we concerned that someone with a mental illness will see the blots online and then later will not be cured because this one diagnostic tool isn't useful? You'd run the same risk with anyone who's seen more than one psychiatrist in their life. Perhaps if the psychiatrist simply asks each patient "have you seen these before?". If a modern doctor considers these inkblots their only tool, perhaps they should retire.
It's a test... I think publishing it online would be the same as publishing any other test online. If it's still generally or widely used, then the ethical implications should be the same as, for example, publishing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator online (trademark issues aside).
The MBTI Foundation's website lists what they consider to be ethical use. But this is opinion, and others might say there are no real ethical issues because it's simply a list of questions people can ask themselves.
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.
You're wrong. The Rorschach test is not, nor has it ever been a tool for identifying what's wrong with you. It's a tool that allows the person administering it to better understand the mental state of the person they're dealing with in a way that doesn't allow them to employ the usual defensive responses. It further allows them to identify what major pathologies might be present, but does not provide a diagnosis. You're essentially implying that any tool which doesn't offer a full-blown diagnosis is akin to superstition and should be discarded.
By that logic, a stethoscope is a useless tool, since it never provides a complete diagnosis, but a set of data points that can be applied to one.
Mod parent up.
Although I generally take "security through obsurity" to mean "the algorithm is the secret". If the whole system relies on exactly these ten blots, this seems more like "the secret is the algorithm". You can't even re-key the lock.
It's broken, they've been given responsible disclosure, and it's already in the wild. Refusal to patch will just make them idiots, and refusal to publish makes Wikipedia complicit.
That _was_ funny ... and also true!
My mother is a retired school psychologist, so I got to be the guinea pig for all of the tests she was learning to administer. By the time she got around to learning Rorschach, I was in high school, so I tormented her by sneaking a peek at the scoring rubric before she gave me the test. The basic approach to being declared unstable was to simply obsess on any given concept - it didn't need to be anything particularly grisly or perverted. Butterflies would do just fine. I took my Mom three images to catch on to what I was doing, and we both had a good chuckle.
What a crock!
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
That's actually serious, since pilots trying to make retirement could use it to pass. I imagine they've thought of that before. At least I hope they have, and are mixing up several versions of the test. Since we all have printers now, they could even print a unique one for each exam if it's something that critical.
Heh. I had a commanding officer taht meomrized it so he could pass a Navy physical exam. Best damn CO I ever had, by the way. And no, he wasn't a pilot.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Wrong. The theoretical basis for the Rorschach test might be bogus, but a theoretical basis isn't needed: the test's validity can be empirically verified by correlating its results to other and unrelated tests (that's how the IQ tests were developed, comparing IQ test results with academic success). Which has, of course, happened. People need to do research to get research grants after all. So we get papers like this:
I'm sure the test has its problems, but saying there's nothing scientific to this, well, that's claptrap. Perhaps you should be less arrogant -- it makes you stupid.
Anecdotally, I know MDs who are total quacks. Who would rather give a prescription for a placebo than an proven effective drug. It's happened to me. Two years ago I went to a real medical doctor to ask for a prescription for Chantix, a provably better-than-placebo drug to help people quit smoking. He said, "No, you don't want that! You want laser therapy!" At the time I'd not heard of laser therapy for smoking cessation, so I asked him "That sounds interesing; what's the mechanism by which it works?" He told me they shine a laser on your ear. I said "No, I mean, what's the physiological mechanism behind it?" He had to admit there wasn't one, it was a placebo.
Asshole had the nerve to charge me for the visit. I looked it up after I left, definitely a placebo. I went to a new doctor and got my prescription for Chantix.
Incorrect. There actually ARE correct answers to the inkblots - no quotes necessary around that 'correct'. The correctness is assigned a number which aggregates over the course of all the blots and assigns a statistical analysis of the level of pathology of the patients psyche. It's actually very robust scientifically and leaves no room for psychological interpretation and is comparable to recall, spelling, or reverse counting tests.
Inkblots typically just show what part of the picture a person looks at first or what's recently occured in the viewer's occular history. For example, on inkblot 10, I started on the outer edge and worked my way in. It looked like two blue lobsters holding icecream bars. (I recently watched Japanese Bug Fights with my daughter)
For most blots, if you start by looking in the center, you're more likely to see a [painted] face or a single figure. If you start on the fringes, you'll more likely see two objects interacting toward a center point. Try it out yourself. Look at a blot starting in the middle and make a note of the first thought that pops up. Then try the blot when you look at the outside and work your way in.
Granted, I didn't learn this from a psychologist, rather from an artist who played with optical illusions. "Do you see a family or do you see an angry skull, or do you just see a pile of rocks?" "I see a family.... I think" "That's because you looked here first. Now focus on this part of the drawing." "Hey, it's a skull!"
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
It's a tool that allows the person administering it to better understand the mental state of the person they're dealing with in a way that doesn't allow them to employ the usual defensive responses.
Really? And what double-blind study shows this?
That's just another in the long line of grand assumptions that psychologists make with these kinds of "tests".
As far as "showing pathologies", how would such idiocy be different from just doing any other kid of cold reading on someone, and why would it have better accuracy?
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
I don't think it's an issue of whether or not the tool provides a full-blown diagnosis. I think it has to do with what the tool measures.
A stethoscope doesn't provide a diagnosis...it just allows the user to hear things that normally can't be heard. It's not subjective at all. The effectiveness of the stethoscope can easily be measured and confirmed. The sounds the stethoscope pick up (typically heart beats/breathing - I'm guessing?) have been *proven* as a useful diagnostic tool.
That's to say, it is possible to hear an abnormal heart beat. Or to hear congestion in the lungs. We (as a scientific community) understand how sound works and we know that some things make sounds; and if we hear a certain type of sound, we know it must have a certain of cause. If the cause of the sound is in your lungs and it's a sound that shouldn't be, we know it's a problem.
The problem most people have with the Rorschach test or 'tool', however you want to word it - is that it doesn't measure anything. It's some pictures. They don't do ANYTHING.
You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers and use that to help show you the state of mind of the person answering. But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind. Someone's answers are highly open for interpretation. Even if we can agree that a certain type of answer or behavior while answering is 'abnormal', we don't know what causes it.
With a stethoscope - you can say, 'This sound....it's almost always the result of X'. With the Rorschach pictures...you can't.
So, a lot of people don't see the benefit. And if the benefit is something like, 'Well, the highly trained professions therapist can pick up on the subtle undertones of the patient and gain insight into the blah, blah, blah' it really seems like you could just say, 'We observe the patient and notice that he's crazy'.
Beyond that, if the test requires the patient not knowing about the test in advance or understanding the test; that's a good reason to question the validity of the test.
If someone has a heart condition that can be detected with a stethoscope - knowing how the stethoscope works - does not affect the results. But, apparently, looking at the pictures, in advance, diminishes their effectiveness.
I'm not saying a Rorschach test is crap. I'm just explaining why I think it's probably crap.
This has many of the hallmarks of a pseudo-science:
And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... and this cigar smells like bullshit.
-Sean
I can't see the "Bat" one as anything except a bat since I've seen it in batman comic books; saw how he saw it as a bat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Then it should be fine to use any 10 random, symmetrical images. The APA's claim that only these 10 specific images have diagnostic value is what smacks of quackery.
Well... there's the problem, you see. Any old tool that allows you to measure angles would work just as well as the standard protractor, but if you invalidate the assumptions of the protractor (e.g. by requiring that all engineering diagrams be drawn on a sphere), then the protractor is now useless.
The same problem exists with the test in question. You could devise an entirely different test, but you'd have to perform all of the research that's gone into the Rorschach all over again to verify how people with specific conditions do or do not respond to, interact with and behave when presented with the test.
People often think that the Rorschach test is about evaluating one's response to random, meaningless input. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Rorschach test is a protractor whose properties are very, very careful controlled. You can, for example, perform the test in a way that's entirely useless while using the correct cards.
Says a lot about the competence of the majority of these so called professionals doesn't it?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
As long as they're throwing hissy fits about Rorschach tests, they might as well yank the article on eye charts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snellen_chart
Here,
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PECFD
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FELOPZD
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I humbly await the eye doctors of the world to DMCA me.
With a stethoscope - you can say, 'This sound....it's almost always the result of X'. With the Rorschach pictures...you can't.
So, a lot of people don't see the benefit. And if the benefit is something like, 'Well, the highly trained professions therapist can pick up on the subtle undertones of the patient and gain insight into the blah, blah, blah' it really seems like you could just say, 'We observe the patient and notice that he's crazy'.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that your exposure to medical information is limited to primarily watching ER, General Hospital, Bones, House, and the like on TV. And that your psychological experience is similarly informed.
Psychology is not an exact, hard science. But it is getting there. I'm the adult child of a clinical psychologist who specializes in testing. I also, in my line of work, specialize in behavioral tests, although to measure neuroscientific parameters rather than psychological ones. Testing is difficult. Having a well-understood tool with a wide body of reference material is important. Intentionally screwing up an important test by publishing the details about that test is unethical.
Beyond that, if the test requires the patient not knowing about the test in advance or understanding the test; that's a good reason to question the validity of the test.
If someone has a heart condition that can be detected with a stethoscope - knowing how the stethoscope works - does not affect the results. But, apparently, looking at the pictures, in advance, diminishes their effectiveness.
I'm not saying a Rorschach test is crap. I'm just explaining why I think it's probably crap.
Your attitude here demonstrates a deep naivite about psychological testing. Have you ever seen the famous images that have dual interpretation (eg, http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/young-lady-or-old-hag.html)? Previous exposure to them makes a HUGE difference in how you answer. Massively huge. Unlike measuring, say, heartbeat, measuring mental state, and visual perception in particular, requires knowing whether or not a subject has previous exposure. It is much easier to assume that there has been zero previous exposure and normalize responses based on that assumption. Allowing previous exposure complicates the test to the point of uselessness. The problem is not that the inkblots are inherently flawed (though they may be for other reasons) but that visual perception is highly sensitive to previous experience.
And, in case you didn't realize, many physiological measurements are highly dependent on the psychological state of the subject. Your heartrate and blood pressure are generally higher when taken in a doctor's office than when taken at home because you are aware of the measurement being taken by someone in a lab coat in a stressful environment. Psychology influences physiology all over the place. That's the whole reason that double-blind testing is the gold standard for medical (even non-psychological) validation: not only does the mental state of the patient matter, the mental state of the doctor administering the test can as well!
So, while your analogy to a stethoscope might seem good at first, it's not really appropriate. Humans are not machines. Biology is messy, and psychology doubly so.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I dropped the word mathematical because it doesn't actually add anything to "model". A model (at least, one which has been operationalized so that one can test it scientifically, and thus which is a valid hypothesis) is always "mathematical" insofar as that makes any difference. (To wit, it can be reduced to a rigorous proposition of symbolic logic.)
"people who exhibit trait 'a' will also exhibit trait 'b'", provided the traits are defined enough so as to make this rigorously testable, is, in addition to being a hypothesis, a consistent model (it may not be as rich a model as some people would like, but that's not the issue.)
a -> b is a mathematical assertion.
No, you can't.
If you are testing a hypothesis in physics, you cannot play fast and loose with the controls, since falling back on math will only tell you what your model predicts, it will not tell you whether your experiment has confirmed it unless you have applied the controls properly.
Actually, there is quite a lot of math that can describe the behavior of human beings, though most of the predictive models that have been tested so far are of limited utility. This is, though, typical of the cutting edge of most fields of science, but social sciences tend to have a lot less well-explored areas, both because it took them longer to be approached as sciences, and because even the most basic areas often require statistical rather than laboratory controls (which required the development of statistical methods before you could even seriously approach them as science), and because of limitations (both practical and ethical) on the ability to due investigations even with such controls.
Math is not a science, math is simply the fundamental tool of all sciences. Including the social sciences.
"Math" and "logic" aren't so much related as two different names for the same thing.
Yeah, actually, it does. Science is the process of refining understandings of the universe by reviewing observations, developing concrete predictive models, and attempting to falsify the concrete predictive models, repeatedly; if you don't have a concrete (which means mathematical) predictive model to test, you aren't doing science, you are doing, most likely, some mixture of observation and unstructured speculation.
If you answer 'inkblot on paper' to all ten, are you obsessed with inkblots?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Destroying the Rorschach test as it exists today might be seen as a public service ...
http://www.division42.org/MembersArea/IPfiles/Spring06/practitioner/rorschach.php
Friend of mine is actually an optometrist. Every time he gets his eyes checked he recites the table verbatim from memory without even looking at it, it earned him some strange, and some angry, looks. Mostly because they usually ask "can you tell me what's written there" instead of the, more accurate, "could you read to me what you can read on the chart there".
And yes, he can tell you what's written there...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.