Graphology

References

• Graphology Wikipedia Article

Notes

Graphology is the analysis of handwriting in an attempt to determine the writer's personality traits. Its methods and conclusions are not supported by scientific evidence, and as such, it is considered to be a pseudoscience.

• Juan Huarte de San Juan's 1575 Examen de ingenios para las ciencias was the first book on handwriting analysis
• After World War 1, interest in graphology continued to spread in Europe and the United States
• Rowan Bayne, a British psychologist who has written several studies on graphology, summarized his view of the appeal of graphology: [I]t's very seductive because at least at a very crude level someone who is neat and well behaved tends to have neat handwriting, adding that the practice is useless ... absolutely hopeless. The British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology, giving them both zero validity
• The Barnum effect (the tendency to interpret vague statements as specifically meaningful) and the Dr. Fox effect (the tendency for supposed experts to be validated based on likeability rather than skill) make it difficult to validate the methods of personality testing. These phenomena describe the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
• A 1991 review of the then-current literature concluded that respondents were able to predict the gender of handwriting between 57 and 78% of the time
• Graphology has been used clinically by counselors and psychotherapists. When it is used, it is generally used alongside other projective personality assessment tools, and not in isolation
• Graphotherapy is the pseudoscience of changing a person's handwriting with the goal of changing features of his or her personality, or "handwriting analysis in reverse."