[intro music] (host) How did the Rorschach 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 then a 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 Frank 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, ultimately, very inaccurate since phrenology also has a history 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 ink blots, 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 to susceptibility to shell shock or the types of stress and 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-taker's 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 Klecksography.

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 also had experimented with using inkblots as a testing measure for creativity, and Hens's 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 as an experiment in perception.

And, important side note-- they're not actually inkblots 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 focus 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 suffer 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 to 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 ten 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's difficult to find an all-encompassing answer to this question, but I have some theories.

The first is that after Rorschach's premature death in 1922, the test spread to the U.S. and was translated into English and other languages.

All though 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 home from war, as 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 from 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 and 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 onscreen 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 setup 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, as a gag in an episode of "Golden Girls," as a character in the "Watchmen" comic-book series, and even on a line of tropical shorts that the Pentagon designed for World War II 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 could still yield useful results.

The Rorschach is a projective test, meaning that the image itself has no meaning outside of what the patient projects onto 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 that 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?

Also, the person administering the test can inject bias into their interpretation of the patient's responses about the image.

Different test-givers can inadvertently create two different personality profiles, causing some to question the reliability of the outcomes.

And also, 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 the 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 test like, "Tell us your favorite side dish and we'll tell you what Disney princess sidekick you are," may not have any merit as a psychological evaluation, inkblots aren't as frivolous as all that.

Rorschach's initial interest in diagnosing disordered thinking alongside his own attraction to perception in art let him to this unusual sight 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 see in the test whatever you like.

So, what do you think?

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