Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we're going to
start looking at ways of assessing personality and we'll start with what
are known as projective techniques. So the idea of a projective technique is
that a person is asked to interpret an ambiguous stimulus. So they're shown
something, they're asked to explain what it is that they're seeing, and the idea
is that they will project onto this image something about their way of
viewing the world. And so by interpreting their responses we can figure out
something about their personality. Now, of course, people are going to give
different answers for these different stimuli and that
means that the responses are only about that specific individual and we're not
really concerned with making comparisons to how other people might interpret the
stimuli. And so what this means is that a projective technique would be considered
idiographic. So if you recall in a previous video, I mentioned the
distinction between nomothetic approaches to personality and
idiographic approaches and projective techniques would fall under idiographic
approaches because they're concerned with the particulars of a single person
rather than universal laws that apply to everyone. Ok, so the most famous
projective technique is probably the Rorschach inkblot test and this is a
test that was created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1918.
And here's a picture of Rorschach here, you can see he looks quite a bit like
Brad Pitt, and Rorschach adapted his childhood hobby of dripping ink onto
paper and then folding it and then opening it to reveal patterns. And so the
ink blot test involves, whoops, looking at these ambiguous ink blots and being
asked to explain what it is that you see. So a participant might look at a slide
like this and say they see you know a butterfly or maybe they see, this looks
like a dog's head here, or you know this looks like some other kind of insect,
or, you know, any number of possible responses. The idea is that by
looking through a series of these slides, and I'll post a link in the video
description where you can see more of these, the Rorschach original slides are
in the public domain now, so you can view them online and the idea is by looking
through a series of these slides the person would reveal something about
their personality in the patterns of their responses. And so the job of the
psychiatrist was to analyze all of the responses to these different stimuli and
then look for patterns and try to find what might be unconscious influences
that were shaping this person's way of responding.
Ok, the next projective technique that we'll look at is called the Thematic
Apperception Test and this was created by Henry Murray. And rather than looking at
these blots of ink here that are ambiguous stimuli, what Murray asked
participants to do was look at situations. So they looked at a series of
cards and these cards were not ambiguous in that they clearly had certain
things in them. So there were people in certain situations and what the
participant was supposed to do was describe what's going on here. What do
you think is going on in this particular little scenario and who are these people?
Who do you think they are and how are they related to one another? And, you know,
how is their relationship? What can you guess from this single image? And then if
they're doing things in this picture, why is it that they're doing that? Why would
this person be acting this way towards this other person? And so the
idea here is that by doing this over a number of scenarios this would reveal
the person's motives, concerns, and views of the social world. So if they
repeatedly saw certain concerns that the characters were having "oh this person is
angry and that's his mother there" and "he's angry with her for this" and then
you know you see a sort of theme maybe of anger throughout all of these
relationships. That would tell you something about the person's view of the
world. Now I'd like to show you an example of the thematic apperception
test but unfortunately they are still under copyright and so it's not supposed to be
shared publicly. But hopefully you get the general idea of you'd look at a
picture, you don't know what's going on, and then you're trying to guess what it
is that's happening. And maybe that would reveal something about your personality.
And now this brings us to analysis of these assessment techniques and there's
a number of problems with projective techniques. The first problem is we
have this assumption that the stated views actually represent something about
the person's personality; they actually tell us about their wishes, their motives,
or their preferences. And that might not necessarily be the case. How do we know
that what they're saying actually represents
who they truly are? We might wonder if the answers are telling us who a
person is or rather how they want to be seen. So, for instance, if I wanted to be
seen in a particular light then I might easily be able to pretend to show that
in my responses. So for instance if I wanted to be considered a dangerous,
violent, individual I might claim to see images of violence and harm and weapons
and blood in the ink blot test. And of course, I might not really see those
things, I might be looking for a way to be seen that way and it might not really
tell you about who I actually am. And similarly, if I give particularly bizarre
answers to the test, I give you some really strange answers, you might wonder
why is it that I'm doing that. You wouldn't, you wouldn't actually know
where those answers are coming from. So it could be the case that I'm just bored
and I'm trying to have some fun here. Maybe I think this task is silly and so
I'm having a little bit of fun with it and I'm trying to entertain myself more
so than give answers that truly reflect my personality. Or maybe I'm just trying
to be unique. Maybe I think, "I know my answers are going to be analyzed and I
don't want to be seen as like everybody else, so I'm going try to come up with
the most bizarre and weird answers that I possibly can just to be different". Or
maybe I'm making jokes, maybe I'm trying to be funny, maybe I'm trying to show the
psychiatrist my sense of humor, and maybe I'm trying and failing. And it's hard to
say whether the psychiatrist thinks what I'm saying is funny or not. Maybe that
will change how they interpret my personality and so this brings us to the
problem of standardization. So we have these ambiguous stimuli and this means
that there's an infinite number of possible responses. That means we
can't standardized the scoring for these types of tests very easily because we
can say there's always some new answer that we've never heard before that this
person might give us. And so how do we make sense of that ?How do we interpret
that? How do we compare that to other scores? How do we standardize this
test? And the answer is we really can't because we have an infinite number of
possible responses. That makes it nearly impossible to really standardize this
test. And it's also the case that people could give similar
answers but they could be for very different reasons. So I might see dogs in
one of the ink blots and maybe this represents my unconscious fear of dogs
or maybe I see dogs because I love dogs and that's what I'm thinking about
all the time. And I have a really close relationship with my pet or something
like that. And the point is we're seeing similar things but the reasons for that
might vary dramatically. And lastly this brings us to the problem of
interpretation. So who gets to decide what my answers actually reveal? So maybe
the interpretation reveals more about the psychiatrist than it does about the
patient. So this is a common criticism of Freud is that he saw sex and
aggression in everything, and maybe that tells us more about Freud's mind than it
tells us about the minds of his patients. And that could certainly be the case for
the interpretation of these projective tests. Ok, I hope you found this helpful,
if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks
for watching!