Wikipedia Debates Rorschach Censorship 635
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?"
Here they are. (Score:5, Informative)
the Rorshach ink blots [deltabravo.net]. 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:I thought they.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
When were they released? (Score:4, Informative)
"Big Secrets" by William Poundstone (Score:5, Informative)
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.
information wants to be free... (Score:4, Informative)
The website cited for being the source of the image currently at the top of the Wikipedia page is here [geocities.com], with its English counterpart being right here [geocities.com].
It includes all 10 Rorschach images.
Re:Ummm... (Score:1, Informative)
That reproduces the blots themselves, but not the decades of responses from other people to compare against. It would be difficult to reconstruct that, and so I can see how this might be damaging provided they provide useful data in the first place, which I'm in no position to judge one way or the other.
Wikipedia is full of abusive admins (Score:1, Informative)
Such as J.delanoy [wikipedia.org] and Dominic who blocks entire ISPs from editing [wikipedia.org]
Re:Here they are. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Contest: what's the earliest publication? (Score:4, Informative)
The earliest publication to the general lay public that I personally know of is their presentation on pages 118-127 of William Poundstone's book Big Secrets, Quill, 1983, ISBN 0-688-04830-7.
In other words, they were out there before the Web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.
Anyone know of any earlier publications?
Re:Progress of society (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:1, Informative)
One wonders how "valuable" a test could be if it could be ruined so easily.
Let's conduct our own little thought experiment:
Which psychologist will make more money over his career? One who cures people in one visit, or one who puts his patients into never-ending rounds of therapy while convincing them they're "getting better".
Makes one wonder how economic pressures force the evolution of psychology, doesn't it?
Listening to Tom Cruise a bit too much? (Score:5, Informative)
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:I thought they.. (Score:3, Informative)
The exercise isn't about what does the patient see compared to what others have seen. The exercise is about how does the patient react compared to how others have reacted.
And for that, the need for 10 consistent meaningless images is dubious. The fact that the Rorschach test is so well known, and so many of the images have already been shown, and that the expectations that people have of the test while participating in it likely makes using those known images even less effective.
Any way, this isn't about getting data, it IS about anecdotal evidence. A psychologist can not even begin to tap an understanding of a persons full life, experiences, and interactions with all of society. They have to make conclusions based on incomplete and quite often inaccurate responses.
-Rick
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I thought they.. (Score:3, Informative)
Heck, they may not even be scared of homosexuals at all...?!?!
Re:its not !@# censorship (Score:3, Informative)
This is a popular myth, that only governments can censor. The truth is, ANYONE can censor, given the power to control someone else's expression; the only difference is that the government is bound by the First Amendment.
Of course, that doesn't stop them - the First Amendment doesn't make exceptions for obscenity or incitement to panic (think "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater"), but those things have been interpreted by the courts as unprotected speech.
My favorite definition, from Dr. Laurence J. Peters: "A censor is someone who knows more than he thinks you should know."
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Nor are the results of the Rorschach test. If they are evaluated subjectively, you've done it wrong. It's just a stethescope. I'm not interested in how your responses make me feel. I'm interested in how your responses meet certain basic, fixed parameters. I am essentially listing to the sound of your mental state for certain irregularities which promote one diagnosis over another. That's what a stethescope does, and it's what a Rorschach does.
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.
Quite true.
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.
Well, in that sense, a stethescope is just some tubes and connectors. It doesn't do anything.
You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers
You can, but then you would be administering a test of your own devising. That's fine, but it's not a Rorschach test, even if you used the standard Rorschach series cards.
But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind. Someone's answers are highly open for interpretation.
Yes and no. There's as much interpretation in the results of a Rorschach test as there is in the results of a stethescope. You have to listen carefully and discern small variations. The parameters are well-understood, but there's a skill in applying them correctly in both cases. Even in the interpretation of an MRI or infrared sky survey there's a great deal of skill involved and the interpretation can most certainly be done wrong in all of the aforementioned cases. The universe is a messy place, and all data is suspect.
Even if we can agree that a certain type of answer or behavior while answering is 'abnormal'
Abnormal isn't useful. What's useful is data.
When you look through a telescope and see that it's light bends a certain way when pushed through optics, you don't say, "that star is abnormal" and leave it at that. You classify the star's optical properties and compare that to the optical properties of other stars. There's no difference, here. The test is designed to allow you to derive a set of metrics by which one patient can be compared to a universe of other patients.
we don't know what causes it.
We don't know what causes gravity and electromagnetism to interact in the way they do, but that doesn't stop us from classifying the behaviors of stars.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not quite that simple because several of the scoring systems, or even parts of the scoring systems, have been downright proven to over-diagnose problems (as an example the comprehensive system when given to people with no history of mental illness frequently produce results which would imply they are barely able to take care of themselves ).
There ARE things the test is good at. At as an example it has a sensitivity and specificity to detect schizophrenia of more than .70 ( highlighting that while useful it should never be the sole method of assessment ). Unfortunately there are also a lot of things it is sometimes used for while being complete garbage at. As an example there is no evidence whatsoever that the test can detect sexual abuse, yet quite a few shrinks still use it for that purpose.
This is the real problem with the test. People don't want to accept that it is flawed because it does have its uses.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:1, Informative)
Well, yes, and astrology, and most other face-to-face therapies. But by providing a convenient and emotionally unburdened subject to talk about, with the added incentive that the therapist should listen carefully, all sorts of interesting things can be revealed., So don't discount it entirely, especially given the placebo effects involved in the subject *believing* that the therapy is relevant.