Graphology

The Graphologists' Method

Graphology involves an examination of a number of specific structural characteristics of a handwriting sample, such as letter shapes and sizes, which are used to make inferences about the writer. For example, in some systems of graphological analysis, the degree of slope in a person's letters is thought to indicate the extent to which a person is introverted versus extroverted. Computerized systems for handwriting analysis exist, but most graphological analyses are still done by individual graphologists. Graphologists typically insist that the handwriting sample for analysis must be spontaneous and that handwriting samples involving copying text from a book or writing a passage from memory do not yield a valid reading. The writing sample requested by a graphologist is often a brief autobiographical sketch or some other sort of self-description.

Graphologists claim that neither the content nor the quality of the writing sample, such as fluency and clarity of expression, influence their assessments and that their evaluations are the result of close examination of the features of letters, words, and lines in the sample. There are several reasons to believe that this claim is false and that even if graphologists try to ignore the content of the writing sample, their assessments are nevertheless strongly influenced by that content. First, several studies have shown that when the same biographical passages are examined by graphologists and nongraphologists, their assessments of individual examinees tend to agree, and graphologists are no more valid in their assessments than nongraphologists. Because nongraphologists presumably do not attend in a systematic way to the graphological features of the writing, but rather to the content of the stories, their ability to make assessments that are similar to and every bit as good as those made by professional graphologists strongly suggests that both groups are attending to the same material—specifically, the content of the writing samples. Indeed, studies by Gerson Ben-Shakhar and his colleagues have shown that predictions based solely on the content of the writing [Page 282]sample are more valid than those obtained from professional graphologists. Second, when the content of passages is not biographical in nature (e.g., meaningless text or text copied from some standard source), graphologists seldom make valid predictions. If their predictions depended solely on the structural features of letters, the content of the passages should not make a difference.

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