In this video I explain how projective techniques have been used to assess personality. These represent an idiographic approach to assessment and focus on the unique aspects of a person’s personality. The most famous projective test is the Rorschach Inkblot Test, created by Hermann Rorschach in 1918. The Thematic Apperception Test created by Henry Murray involves explaining an ambiguous situation and the people involved. While projective tests may provide insights about personality, it’s important to remember that answers may not represent actual motives and that there are problems with standardization and interpretation.

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Video Transcript

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!