Comments on: Rorschach and awe

By: Michael MacAskill

Michael MacAskill — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:26:10 +0000

I think that’s a remarkably generous interpretation of the reasoning behind the excessive fees charged for access to neuropsychological/psychiatric tests.
It seems to be that neuropsychologists have a default mindset that they are entitled to make money out of their tests, no matter how banal. The rest of us, practicing in other fields in the science of psychology, fully disclose our methods to allow others to replicate and refine them if they should so desire. In fact, we desperately hope that is what will happen.
The idea that, for example, a simple multiple choice pencil & paper questionnaire should be restricted and charged per copy only restricts the extent to which it will be applied and further validated. These charges restrict the development of science rather than promote it.

By: smallerdemon

smallerdemon — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:32:43 +0000

“Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material.”
Ah, the good old days. They are soon to be over. The upside is that this will force people into more creative ways of making assessments other than a generalized one size fits all testing which probably has some statistically significant outliers.
I am also reminded of your book from this statement of the fact that there are certain ways the brain works that foreknowledge is irrelevant anyway. Many of the self experiments you can do in the book garner exactly the results you are looking for despite foreknowledge of how it works. i.e. your brain follows a process that is not impacted by knowledge of the process. In my own mind it brings up questions of the physiological basis of psychology and the fuzzy line between what is physically predictable and where the separation point is between a physical response and subjective response.
I find the whole idea of the Rorschach tests completely silly. It’s a pattern recognition test and that is all. It’s going to be influenced by so many different factors in a person’s life experiences (and THOSE are going to be specific to the culture and social environment of the individual) that attempting any objective psychological analysis of it is ridiculous.

By: rita

rita — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:13:52 +0000

So much for “Giving psychology away” (George Miller). Get it all out there, I say – or is it a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
When is psychoanalysis and its hangovers going to be considered the woo it is?

By: liedra

liedra — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:35:39 +0000

There was an interesting comment on this report over at my friends’ ethics blog: http://cappe-postgrads.blogspot.com/2009/07/tell-me-what-do-you-see.html and how the comparisons made by the Dr. who posted the pictures to wikipedia were really stupid (comparing wanting to not post the pictures with Chinese censoring of Tiananmen square?! wtf?). Anyway, thought you might be interested