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..

[xant]

On the contrary, in order to interpret the results scientifically, you have to have already used them and determined a basis for scoring. How this is classically done with the original Rorschach is a series of markings based on the contents of the respondent's answer. They also score things like whether you pick the card up, whether you turn it around, whether you give more than one answer, etc. Without a fixed means of scoring the blots, you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.

But there are other tests out there, with their own means of scoring. Some of them even try to generate random inputs.

Re:I thought they..

[clifyt]

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...

Re:I thought they..

[Robert1]

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.

Re:I thought they..

[Atrox666]

If there are only 10 then why are they all pictures of my mother when she's angry?

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..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am both a dope smoker and a scientifically-minded person, you insensitive clod!

Re:I thought they..

[LaskoVortex]

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?

They are useful. Here were my answers: butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly. Based on my answers, my analyst, Dr. Lector, said I was a tedious but promising candidate to be a murderous sociopath. He said it was going to take some work, though. I'm now in a cage taking heavy doses of barbiturates "to help me with my progress". I'm still waiting for the next phase of treatment when I get the spinal injections before being forced to listen to Beethoven's Ode to Joy and watching Nazis have sex with prostitutes.

Who would have thought so much treatment could be advised from how one interprets bilaterally symmetric and colorful images that have the same vague appearance as a major phylogeny from the tree of life. I feel better already!

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..

[Munden]

I too scoff at the validity of these so called Rorschach tests. Any Phrenologist will tell you the only thing that really matters is the shape of your head. For you see, the form of the cranium represents the form of the brain, and thus reflects the relative development of the brain organs.

Re:I thought they..

[ajs]

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.

Re:I thought they..

[Robert1]

I really don't know why your post is filled with such vitriol. Anyway there is nothing secret about the "scientific means" behind it (as much as you wish there was by the fact that you used quotes...). The test is valid because they used an enormously large sample size and a library of several hundred pictures, which through its massive sample size, were able to distill down using statistics to those 10 pictures which had the highest positive predictive value!

Those 10 pictures were specifically chosen because they were the most deterministic pictures. If I took all of Pollock's works and showed them to tens of thousands of people, and recorded all the responses I'm sure I could produce a handful of pieces by Pollock which have a high correlation among viewers to a specific object - i.e. that one piece is viewed as a 'bat' by 80% of viewers. Taking it one step further, Pollock's art was never even designed to be used in such a way, however the inkblots were from the onset intentionally designed to maximize their correlation, and thus future predictive value.

I've taken the exam myself with a group of about 10 others as a learning experience. On average, the answers correlated completely except for one individual. By the end, it seemed each person had answered one "wrong" i.e. hadn't seen the "right" image. However, that didn't mean the group had any psychological pathology, as the incorrect answers were not given consistently. A 90% correlation means on average, the average (healthy) person will agree with an image 90% of the time. If a person answers 6 out of 10 wrong, the statistical likelihood of that occurring in a healthy individual becomes suspiciously small.

That is the power of the inkblots and the science behind them - science without quotes.

Re:I thought they..

[ColdWetDog]

Whadda I know.... I just sit in my office designing / validating psychologically sound tests all day...

You sound angry. Tell me how you feel about this.

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..

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, I saw butterfly, red x, red x, red x, red x, red x, red x, butterfly, butterfly, red x

Re:I thought they..

[rogerz]

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!

Re:I thought they..

[Chris Burke]

I'm now in a cage taking heavy doses of barbiturates "to help me with my progress".

And I see he thought a laptop with internet access would help too. Very wise, this Dr. Lector...

Re:I thought they..

[CorporateSuit]

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!"

Re:I thought they..

[Endymion]

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?

Re:I thought they..

[lennier]

Whadda I know.... I just sit in my office designing / validating psychologically sound tests all day...

You sound angry. Tell me how you feel about this.

Does it please you to believe that I sound angry tell you how I feel about this?

Re:I thought they..

[RobDude]

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.

Re:I thought they..

[ajs]

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.

Re:I thought they..

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

I think this hilights your misunderstanding of the test. The point is that you compare the patient's responses to the responses of thousands of other people who have looked at the image before. It is NOT a Freudian inspection of a person's subconscious. If you show them something that everyone on the planet agrees looks like a piglet and they say it looks like their mother attacking them with a machete, that is a helpful tool for a psychologist.

Re:I thought they..

[severoon]

The test does provide interesting info. Not about the subject, though--about the one administering it, to the observers that are always behind the one-way mirror, evaluating that person.

(Just doing my part to make the psychologists of the world paranoid.)

Re:I thought they..

[TaoPhoenix]

"What do you see?"
"I see a lonely aging man whose degree was too volatile and who is now being passed by the information age."
"Very good. What about this one?"
"I see a dream of a time gone by, when life had a hope worth living."

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..

[Omniscient Lurker]

She'd say: "Oh God, he's never going to move out is he?"

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.

Here they are.

[xant]

the Rorshach ink blots. Oops, it seems I have exposed them to the public, I guess the whole debate is moot now.

Seriously though, there are a million associative tests, I didn't think anyone even used the original Rorschach any more except to discuss it in beginning psychology classes.

Re:Here they are.

[mwvdlee]

Those are the outlines of the inkblots. Those have been public for quite some time now but psychologists believed they had no significant influence on the reliability of the actual test (which, I guess, means the outlines didn't make the tests less unreliable). The wikipedia images are the actual colored blobs and DO have the desired effect of making a useless test unusable.

Lets see...

[Q-Hack!]

Exposer to to pseudo-science renders it useless??? Now if we can apply that to Intelligent design?

So what???

[Muad'Dave]

Everyone knows they're all pictures of boobs anyway.

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.

The blots

[DarrenBaker]

Here are some examples of ink blots, and patient reaction.
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF233-Psychoanalyst.jpg

"Big Secrets" by William Poundstone

[mattack2]

At least some of them showed up in "Big Secrets" by William Poundstone over 20 years ago. (Great book IMHO, though the sequels go down in quality as he scrounges for more secrets.) He also discusses what types of things are 'bad' to see in them.

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.

Re:Suggested reading

[flaming error]

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.

Rorschach Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the Wikipedia page and saw what appears to be ten pictures of vaginas. Is that why everyone is so worked up about this?

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!

Wait until the optometrists...

[dpbsmith]

Wait until the optometrists discover that Wikipedia is using an uncensored Snellen eye chart. Pssst! The big letter at the top is an "E."

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

Re:Progress of society

[Anonymous Coward]

Try going to a Penn & Teller show and telling everyone how each trick is done.

Why bother? Penn& Teller already do that as part of their act.

Listening to Tom Cruise a bit too much?

[spun]

Psychologists used other means to diagnose people, then gave them the Rorschach test. They found correlations between certain diagnoses and certain types of answers or behaviors exhibited during the test. The Rorschach test is not a definitive test that will tell you unequivocally what specific mental issues you have. Like all psychological tests, it is just one tool among many that helps a trained expert make a diagnosis. For instance, if the Rorschach test says you are a psychopath, but you show a capacity for empathy and remorse, any trained psychologist will know that the test simply didn't work on you.

Re:Listening to Tom Cruise a bit too much?

[cutecub]

This has many of the hallmarks of a pseudo-science:

• The implicit assumption of a mechanistic relationship behind the supposed correlation.
• An Inability to put forward a falsifiable theory based on testable hypothesis (how does it work? No, really. How. Does. It. Work?).
• Unchanging over time, despite the availability of new information (is it better than an FMRI scan? If no, why? If yes, why?)
• Results tainted by the confirmation bias of the psychologist (the test works, except when it doesn't. Just like Astrology and Homeopathy.)

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

Re: Obsess

[TaoPhoenix]

1 pr0n
2 Children
3 terrorists
4 copyright
5 iphone
6 free/beer
7 grass-mud horse
8 Obama
9 ubuntu
10 NYCL

On the other hand ...

[Pinky's Brain]

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

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.