How did the Rorschach Inkblot Test become a pop culture phenomenon?
And can it actually reveal anything about your personality?
A psychiatrist holding up an inky blob and saying “what does this look like?” to
a patient on the proverbial couch is usually considered more of a film gag than a medical
remedy.
But the Rorschach Inkblot Test has a history as a real method of medical evaluation.
So how did it move from a psychiatric evaluation and personality test to a pop culture punchline?
So to dive into this history we first have to ask:
When did personality tests emerge and why did we start administering them?
Well the study of human personality traits stretches back into some iffy scientific methods
in the 18th and 19th century when scientists were looking for a way to regularly uncover
desirable or undesirable traits.
Take for example phrenology.
This weird science was developed in Vienna by physician Franz Joseph Gall, and entailed
measuring the shape of your head and feeling the bumps on your skull to determine something
about your inner traits.
Weird and inaccurate, since phrenology also has a history that enmeshed in scientific
racism.
But the earliest personality tests, or exams and systems established to measure your personality
(without having to measure your brain bumps) starts in the early 20th century.
But before we get to Inkblots, perhaps the earliest example of a personality test is
the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet.
Developed during World War I by the United States Army.
It was designed to test potential recruits for susceptibility to shell shock, or the
types of stress or PTSD that soldiers were afflicted with after combat.
But the test was only geared towards measuring potential instability, and not actually geared
towards looking at all aspects of a test takers’ personality.
So that leads us to our next question: How did the now infamous inkblot test emerge?
Swiss Psychologist Hermann Rorschach popularized and invented the test in the early 20th century,
although he drew his methods from a variety of sources.
Rorschach trained with psychiatrist Carl Jung, but he also had a background in art since
his father was a drawing instructor.
So he had a passion for psych and psychedelic patterns.
And although Rorschach never attributed the origins of the test to this, there were also
popular children’s games that utilized inkblots like Blotto and Klecksographie.
But Rorschach didn't invent Using inkblots to measure patients’ unconscious thoughts
and traits.
This idea dates back to the mid 19th century, and other 20th century psychiatrists such
as Carl Jung and Szyman Hens greatly influenced Rorschach’s work.
French psychologist Alfred Binet had also experimented with using inkblots as a testing
measure for creativity.
And Hens’ use of inkblots to study patients was uncovered by Rorschach in 1917.
After that he began developing his own famous test.
At first Rorschach wasn’t using the inkblots as a test but rather an experiment in perception.
And important side note: they’re not actually ink blots, but drawings that he made himself.
He wanted to use the symmetrical spots to see how different people view the world differently
from each other.
His early uses of the inkblots focused on the differences between how patients with
schizophrenia responded to the blots versus patients without schizophrenia.
He found that people who didn’t suffer from hallucinations or disordered thinking had
(generally) similar answers, whereas those that did suffer from those symptoms had answers
that fell outside of the standard responses.
Over time he decided to standardize his tests and methods.
He felt that this test was effective in measuring early diagnoses of schizophrenia because patients
who suffered from hallucinations had substantially different responses to the blots than patients
who didn't.
So the inkblots were useful in getting patients to describe their sense of perception.
His earlier models of the test from 1918-1920 featured 40 plus inkblots, but after his initial
trial he reduced the number down to 15 blots that he believed were significant.
In 1921 he published his book on the subject Psychodiagnostics but it received little fanfare.
But the number of inkblots was whittled down to 10 since that’s as many as the publisher
was willing to feature.
Sadly, Rorschach himself didn’t live to see the full impact of his creation, because
he died in 1922 at the age of 37.
So the name Rorschach has become linked to ink.
But considering the test wasn’t a massive success until after his death, then why did
Rorschach become a household name?
And why did the test proliferate across pop culture?
So it was difficult to find an all encompassing answer to this question, but I have some theories.
The first is that after Rorscach’s premature death in 1922, the test spread to the US and
was translated into English and other languages.
Although he originally intended for the test to focus on patients with mental disorders,
soon other psychologists were using it in criminal defense cases, to test soldiers returning
from war, a test for children, and as a personality test for college admissions and job placements.
Without Rorschach around to give guidance on the limits of the test or how to apply
it, others began to find and apply different diagnostic measures for the infamous inkblot.
So the test we see now is derived from the original Rorschach inkblot findings, but has
taken on many evolutions since then.
As for pop culture the inkblot exploded in popularity, especially in the mid 20th century,
alongside the expansion of film and later TV.
One reason for the test’s proliferation might be that the test is visual, which is
extremely helpful for film/TV storytelling and something of a departure from other contemporary
personality tests that focus largely on questionnaires and words.
Seeing the stark, black and white, image on screen could be a more compelling example
of psychiatry than simply hearing the words (even though some of Rorschach’s original
blots are in color).
And having a person in a film or movie reveal the projections as clues to their inner thoughts
can serve as a powerful narrative device or a set up for a good joke, depending on what
they see.
As a result inkblots have popped up all over visual culture, like in Get Smart, in Andy
Warhol’s 1980s paintings, a gag in an episode of Golden Girls, a character in the Watchmen
comic books, and even on a line of tropical shorts that the Pentagon designed for WW2
veterans in the 1940s.
So all of this information on a pop culture anomaly is interesting but it’s time to
ask perhaps the most pressing question of all: Does the inkblot test actually work?
Well even though the Rorschach may have fallen out of fashion, some argue it can still yield
useful results.
The Rorschach is a projective test, meaning that the image itself has no meaning outside
of what the patient projects on to it.
So by showing a person a meaningless blob and asking her what she thinks it means, then
she’s actually telling you about herself and the way she views the world and less about
what the blob really is.
Rorschach’s initial interest in the test was seeing how differently his schizophrenic
patients interpreted the images versus other patients.
But it wasn’t until 1939 that the test was broadly used as a projective test of personality.
And a lot of the criticism around the test comes from a set of real concerns, namely:
Rorschach intended for the test to measure disordered thinking, not personality traits.
That piece of the test didn't flourish until after his death.
So can we really trust the results?
Is the person administering the test injecting bias into their interpretation of the patient’s
response about the image.
Different test givers can inadvertently create two different personality profiles, causing
some to question the reliability of the outcomes.
And, now that the images are readily available online, the test has been somewhat compromised.
But some psychiatrists still consider it a useful tool as part of other therapies.
There have also been attempts to standardize the test results’ such as the Exner scoring
system, which is sometimes called the Rorschach comprehensive system.
Developed in 1960s and 70s by John Exner, the system looks to increase the reliability
of the inkblot test by creating a standard method for interpreting patients’ responses.
So how does it all add up?
Well while tests like “tell us your favorite side dish and we’ll tell you what Disney
princess sidekick you are” may not have any merit as psychological evaluations, inkblots
aren’t as frivolous as that.
Rorschach’s initial interest in diagnosing disordered thinking alongside his own attraction
to perception and art led him to this unusual psych test.
The little inky blobs had a history as an evaluation for schizophrenic patients, before
becoming a projective test, and eventually ending up as a sight gag splashed across 20th
century screens.
Which makes a certain amount of sense since you can in the test whatever you like.
So what do you think?
Want to take a look at one of these inkblots and tell us what you see?
Any other new info on the history of the blot?
So before we go we wanted to give a shout out to one of our viewers, Nataliya on youtube
who asked to know more about the history of personality tests after I mentioned them in
our episode on women in computer programming.
Thanks Nataliya, and send us more recommendations on topics you’d like covered!
See you next week!
We had so many great questions from last week on why kids have their own bedrooms!
Ananya on Youtube asked what other cultures outside of the West developed seperate sleeping
habits.
Check out the link in the description for an abstract on studies of sleeping cultures
in Japan that shifted from interdependence to more independent sleeping arrangements
between mothers and babies.
Also the text Sleep Around the World: anthropological perspectives edited by Katie Glaskin and Richard
Chenhall.
Thanks Ananya!
Max Jensen on Youtube also asked about the promotion of separate sleep in workhouses
and why twin beds were portrayed as ideal in the 20th century.
Benjamin Reiss goes more into this topic in Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our
Restless World which I mentioned last week.
The connection of workhouses with communal sleep (with either people divided by gender
but still sharing intimate space or whole families sleeping all together) was tied by
Victorian reformists to illness and disease.
The cramped quarters, with their low hygiene and poor air circulation was portrayed as
promoting disease because people slept too closely together.
Although some illness was in fact caused by these bad arrangements, it wasn’t all.
So in the early 20th century when twin beds were being marketed it was with the tagline
that it was “healthier” to sleep alone rather than too close to another person.
Check out to book for more info and also for citations on the ads that were run in the
19th century against workhouses and in the 20th century for twin beds!
Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week!