The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves

James Wood, a University of Texas psychology professor who would soon emerge as the Rorschach’s leading detractor, and two coauthors published a highly critical article in the respected journal Psychological Science. “Basic issues regarding the reliability and validity of the Comprehensive System have not been resolved,”

What’s Wrong With the Rorschach?, written with M. Teresa Nezworski, Scott Lilienfeld, and Howard Garb and released in 2003.

Yet the Rorschach is still used by eight out of ten clinical psychologists, administered in nearly a third of emotional injury assessments and in almost half of child custody evaluations.

Today personality testing is a $400-million industry, one that’s expanding annually by 8 percent to 10 percent.

“I make no apology” for relying on such loosely compiled data, insists Exner.

Today it’s administered to an estimated 15 million Americans each year, in spite of the fact that it features invasive questions about test takers’ sex lives and bathroom habits.

The Rorschach routinely “overpathologizes” healthy people, Wood and the others maintain, making them seem much more dysfunctional than they really are.

bridge of the nose) has been associated with negativity and neuroticism.

“If psychologists used tea leaves instead of the Rorschach, we’d probably be better off, because then, at least, no one else would take the results seriously,” he says.