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?"
I thought they.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it gets out, we can't bill for it! (Score:1, Insightful)
There, I fixed their complaint.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Moot (Score:1, Insightful)
If they are already in the public domain, won't the kind of people who would want to see them be able to see them? The fact that they might be on wikipedia could make it easier, but they will probably be on google -- which will make it only marginally more difficult.
Public Domain Man (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Actually, it is now an act of full-disclosure (Score:1, Insightful)
If these images are posted by wikipedia, they are rendered utterly useless. If one assumes that the chances are high that people will (now) come across these images elsewhere and it that could contribute to misdiagnostics, this is not only fine, it is the responsible thing to do.
Publishing them on wikipedia would go a long way into forcing people to produce a new batch of test images (preferably a thousand of them or so), which is the responsible thing to do.
Too late to worry about quack science (Score:1, Insightful)
"since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test"
They were ineffective the day they were invented. This is VooDoo science it's best, and public exposure of it as a sham is long over do.
This stuff isn't even being taught anymore.
Suggested reading (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that the APA is the latest group that needs to do some reading on why security through obscurity [wikipedia.org] just doesn't work.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:1, Insightful)
Perry Bible Fellowship is almost as good a cultural touchstone as the Simpsons... but goes places that broadcast TV isn't allowed.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:1, Insightful)
> ...you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.
We're discussing psychology here. Hand waving is already all we have.
Clearly they should be omitted from wikipedia... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I thought they.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Are the images important? (Score:5, Insightful)
My Psyc Professor Already Invalidated Them (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I thought they.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong, we have scientific studies that show the effectiveness of various methods and treatments. You can debate the accuracy of these studies, but calling them 'hand waving' is frankly, mere hand waving on your part. Some psychology may be mere hand waving, true, but then I also know actual M.D.s who prescribe homeopathics.
They'll include the pics (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are the images important? (Score:3, Insightful)
You were really really close...
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
6.1 Verify validity of inkblots with strong correlation thus establishing the utility of the inkblots
6.2 Sell to to psychiatrists/psychologists as a diagnostic tool
7 profit
Or conversely
6.2 Doctor uses statistical results on real patient.
6.3 Results help to diagnose patient.
6.4 Payment from patient for services rendered leads to:
7. profit
Re:Moot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it Human Nature to Foul One's Home? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. You simply have no perspective or any real understanding.
Academic and intellectual freedom are what has allowed you and
your forebears to make it out of childhood and to breeding age.
Without free inquiry and the open exchange of ideas, the progress
of the last half millenium would never have happened. You would
not be here to propose bad ideas.
Similar progress in the future is threatened by any selfish small
group of society that abuses high sounding phrases for their own
benefit. This isn't just about the practice of psychaitry. It's
about science and society in general.
If the Rorschact test can't stand the light of day then it's of no real value.
It's time to adapt. "smart people" would have seen this coming and made accomodations.
Re:Are the images important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Largely so, in the original method.
Nowadays, generally you aren't measuring what the person sees(a dog vs tits), but the manner of their perception. Are they vague or specific, how closely it resembles the inkblot, or does the person give motives to whatever he sees(dog vs growling dog).
While nobody is exactly the same, our brain structure shares some commanality and the perception:disfunction pairings can be correlated within genetic and cultural groups(can't see a giraffe if you just walked out of the Amazon outback).
The human perceptions system is greatly affected by other brain functions, such as in schizophrenia where drawings may become wildly stylized, e.g. this series of cat paintings [cerebromente.org.br] that start out normal and end up looking like fractals as the disease goes on. (Has anyone disproved this yet? Induced symptoms through TCMS seemed to validate it)
The downside is that it is still largely subjective. There have been some improvements(saying something looks like underwear doesn't make automatically make you a perv anymore), but as long as the scoring varies between testers(which it does) it is just as open to misinterpretation and manipulating as using autonomic responses to indicate veracity.
Similarly, any test that is broken by foreknowledge of the test is equally broken as a test that relies on the subject to be completely truthful.
.
TLDR: it's bullshit, but it can be useful bullshit, like simplified models of the atom.
Pravin Lal is correct again... (Score:3, Insightful)
See quote in signature.
Seriously, even without having searched for the blots previously, you just can't grow up without seeing a few of them in movies and such. So, if the test requires secrecy to work, it has failed a long time ago.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Insightful)
> > 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.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Is it Human Nature to Foul One's Home? (Score:2, Insightful)
> Nobody else has any legitimate reason to access it unless they're being examined.
Could we have an example of an "illegitimate" reason?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it Human Nature to Foul One's Home? (Score:2, Insightful)
Human being seem to always put their own short-term self-interest ahead of group self-interest, even when group self-interest is in the individual's longer term self-interest. There is no good reason to broadcast the Rohrschach test. Anybody who wants to do research can access it without any problem. Nobody else has any legitimate reason to access it unless they're being examined.
In most countries you can have your civil rights removed on the basis of psychological testing and diagnoses. It can affect the outcome of court cases, education and employment, gun rights, drivers licensing, even up to forcible detention and medication. Most of those do not even require a conviction against you. Psychologists and psychiatrists have no right to secret procedures. They have been handed too much power for that to be a viable option.
If they wish to have secret procedures, then it ought to be the law of the land that no diagnoses has any legal effect except it is confirmed by jury.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are correct answers.
Those answers would be the ones that keep you out of the loony bin.
They may not have specific answers, but there sure as hell are right answers.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not true at all.
Of course there are correct answers. The correct answers is determined by your goal.
If you want to be considered insane criminal trial, then the right answer are the ones that get you labels insane. If you want to be considered sane, then the correct answers are the ones you give to meet that goal.
And if you think any viewer doesn't realize that, your fooling yourself.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Wow. check that fools out. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently they think the public is SO stupid that, the ones who are intent on dodging the test are uncapable of finding access to the test images even now.
there should be an elitism & down to earthness test for scientists to prevent such foolery of mind.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Phrenology has a serious flaw.
If you know the scoring, you can smash your skull with a hammer in exactly the right spot to create a bump. Lessee, ...
You could pay for the power grid in the other story off the paradox.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Scoring (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I thought they.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Magic (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
It seems to me that this is a fight over superstitions; the strength of the Rorschach test is not that here we have a set of carefully constructed, magical devices such as mankind has never seen before. The basic idea, if I'm not mistaken, is to get the subject to look at them and talk about whatever thoughts are inspired by them. The precise shapes are not important, and you can use any other device in the same way, eg. Tarot cards.
This is incidentally the way Tarot cards make it possible to "see the future" - everybody can predict things, it is just a matter of remembering and thinking about all the facts; by looking at a number of Tarot cards and trying to relate the symbols to your circumstances, you force yourself to think out of the box, thus bringing more of the things you already know into your conscious awareness, which gives you a better basis from which to predict things. Nothing magical about it.
Mmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Might be a pain in the arse to the psychologists but surely this *helps* anyone who has seen them. If you're being asked to take one of these test (I have never been in that position) then it suggest that they believe there is a *possibility* you could be psychotic etc. Thus, in any sensible (even psychotic) mind, it's only good sense to make the test fail. I fail to believe that they could ever possibly be a rigourous diagnostic tool anyway and thus this allows the following:
"Now, we're going to be taking an inkblo..." ..."
"Horse, fridge, man driving up a hill,
"Eh?"
"Rorschach, yes?"
"Yes."
"I just invalidated the results of your test, didn't I?"
"Well, yes."
"Good... could we have something a little more rigourous and bit less 'Hollywood' please, if you're going to be seriously analysing me?"
And if the analyst *doesn't* abandon the test at that point? That's probably a good ground for misconduct because even their own representative groups *say* that the test is useless if you've seen the images before.