Handwriting Analysis: The Assessment of Graphology ~ E. A. Rundquist

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This previously secret handwriting analysis document was produced for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before being approved for release into the public domain through the CIA historical review program.

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Two threads of argument run through the foregoing article on handwriting analysis. The first asserts the great need for research studies because "a proper test run has never been devised and carried out, at least not in the United States, to determine whether any graphologist can consistently deliver accurate results in the area of character delineation." The second asserts the value of graphology here and now as an assessment technique, making sweeping claims of what it can do. The arguments are essentially incompatible. If the claims are correct, the research is unnecessary; if there is no research evidence, the claims are unsupported. With the need for research to establish the value of graphology as an assessment technique I am in full agreement. I disagree with the claims for its current effectiveness.

The article makes a number of cogent points. It distinguishes between the well-established branch of graphology devoted to problems of personal identification and the branch devoted to character analysis; it stresses the need for research studies; it recognizes many of the pitfalls that need be avoided in carrying out such studies; it acknowledges that traditional psychological assessment is preferable to handwriting analysis when direct access to the individual is possible. With these points I am in general agreement. A little elaboration of all but the first, which is too well established to require comment, may be helpful.

Scope of Research

In evaluating graphology - or any other assessment technique - not just one, but many studies are required. Studies of agreement among graphologists, the development of objective techniques for measuring characteristics of handwriting, refinements in the methods used, hypotheses such as "small handwriting with closed and knotted o's and a's indicates secretiveness" - all these are useful and interesting, but they do not answer the main question: How well does it in fact predict behavior? Or in the terms psychologists like to use: What is its validity? Studies should therefore be concentrated in this area, a point I stress not in disagreement with Mr. Laycock, but because of its importance.

Validation studies in the area of personality assessment are not easy to do. There are many complicating factors - getting a representative sample of persons to participate, getting the same kind of information about each, getting information in sufficiently specific terms on the behavior one is trying to predict. This last problem is recognized by Mr. Laycock as a semantic one. "What is a brave man?" he asks. If there is no agreement on what a brave man is, there is obviously no means of checking on anyone's assertion that a person is brave.

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Is Psychology an Empirical Science? ~ DAVID KRONEMYER

  

The answer is “yes,” although it is different from physics and chemistry, and historically there has been considerable confusion surrounding this issue.  In 1948 Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim formulated what they called the “deductive nomological model” of scientific explanation (Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948).  A deductive nomological model is one in which a single event is subsumed under a general law.  It is fully accounted for by applying the general law to a set of initial premises or conditions, which then logically result in an observed phenomenon.  The premises must be empirically true, the conclusion logically derivable from the premises, and the general law must be a necessary component of the explanation.  Physics is the paradigm case of a science where laws of nature can be devised and applied deterministically.  Thus (simplifying), Newton apocryphally saw an apple starting to fall from a tree (the initial conditions); it descended to the ground, in some versions of the story, hitting him on the head (the observation); whereupon he devised the inverse square law (the general law) (Newton, 1687/1999).  The general law is necessary to explain what happened to the apple, and the future resting place of the apple (on the ground) is logically derivable from the general law as applied to the initial conditions (the apple falling off the tree).  Newtonian mechanics proved useful not only in clarifying what happens when subsequent apples altered their position in space and time, but also in devising hypotheses to predict specific instances where the same general law applies, for example, the trajectory of cannonballs or launching rockets to the moon.  These hypotheses can be tested experimentally.

 

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