Graphology

Be careful what you write like

Last night, I was cleaning my room and found some old magazines I used to read in my teenage years. As I was flipping through them, I stumbled across a test that claimed to be able to describe my personality simply by looking at my handwriting. Curious to compare this measure to newfound knowledge of psychological tests acquired in class, I decided to research on its actual validity.

Graphology, or handwriting analysis, is a projective measure that can be used to assess individuals’ personality traits “based on the premise that handwriting is an expressive motor movement”, and is subsequently used to predict future behavior (Tett & Palmer,1997, 11). The most common way to analyse handwriting is graphoanalysis (Tett & Palmer,1997). Personally, I was not taking the handwriting test seriously; however, as absurd as this may sound, it is very popular in several countries, including France and Israel, as part of ways to determinate whether or not to hire an individual (Tett & Palmer,1997). In fact, according to Tett and Palmer, 80% of firms used graphologists in these two countries (Tett & Palmer,1997), at least in the 1990s when their paper was published.

Tett and Palmer (1997), authors of The validity of handwriting elements in relation to self-report personality trait measures, state that it is face validity (whether a test appears to measure what it measures) that attracts individuals into using the test (Tett & Palmer,1997). They claim that “because handwriting expresses uniqueness in the individual and is relatively stable over time, it seems appropriate for reflecting individual differences in personality” (Tett & Palmer,1997, 11).

In their article, Tett and Palmer (1997) tested 49 undergraduate students writing a content-neutral text. Two trained coders were required to analyse their handwriting, in the hopes of assessing the validity of graphoanalysis (Tett & Palmer,1997). Participants also completed the Jackson Personality Inventory- Revised (JPI-R; Jackson, 1994, as cited in Tett & Palmer,1997) that consists in measures of 15 personality traits (Tett & Palmer,1997). Even if the inter-rater reliability was around 0.80, handwriting and JPI-R scales were barely significant (the authors declare significance “at around chance levels (i.e. 5%)” (Tett & Palmer,1997, 15). This study supports what I was thinking all along- that trying to assess personality through handwriting would probably not yield an accurate prediction. But hey! It was still fun to retake the test ten years later and realize that I received the same result I’d gotten when I was a child…

Reference: Tett, R. P., & Palmer, C. A. (1997). The validity of handwriting elements in relation to self-report personality trait measures. Personality and individual differences, 22(1), 11–18.

STUDENT ID: 260536084