Downey’s interest in the somewhat vague field of “temperament testing” also encompassed the outright craziness of the Fernald Achievement Capacity Test, which was based on the idea that the longer a person can stand with his heels exactly one-quarter inch off the floor, the stronger his drive and determination; it was hoped that the test might separate young men of staunch moral fiber from budding delinquents.12
The times must have been ripe for offbeat psychological theories—this was the heyday not only of silly pseudosciences like phrenology (reading character from bumps on the head), physiognomy (reading character from facial features), mesmerism, and its outgrowth, hypnotism, but dangerous ones like eugenics.
One of the most interesting studies in graphology was done by Gordon Allport and Philip E. Vernon at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in 1930.
Gordon Allport (image credits 3.10)
Allport was an Indiana boy, a Harvard hotshot (B.A., Ph.D., professorship, department head), and a “firm believer in the integrity of every human life,” which led him to work with troubled youth in Boston. Possibly the most famous story about Allport was his meeting with Freud when he was twenty-two. When Allport arrived at Freud’s office, Freud didn’t say a word, just sat there waiting for Allport to speak. Finally, flustered, he told Freud that on his way there on the bus he’d sat behind a little boy who seemed to have an extreme dirt phobia: he refused to sit in a seat that had just been vacated by a filthy old man. Freud finally spoke: “And was that little boy you?” Thus began Allport’s distrust of psychoanalysis.
Vernon was British—he was born in Oxford, but all his degrees were from Cambridge, and his dissertation was on “the psychology of music appreciation,” which sounds potentially fascinating but apparently remained unpursued. He met Allport during a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, when both were working on the study of expressive movement.
Philip E. Vernon (image credits 3.11)
Allport and Vernon based their research on the idea that people’s movements and gestures correlate to their attitudes and values—i.e., their character—and that the way they write is “intricately woven with the deep-lying determinants of conduct.” They were especially impressed by the fact that, whether one writes left-handed, right-handed, with the feet, or with a pen held between the teeth, the handwriting is consistent, and that the only factors that could change it substantially would be multiple-personality disorders (in which each “face of Eve” writes differently),13 extreme drunkenness, or a delusion in which, for example, a patient thinks he’s Napoleon and therefore will write like Napoleon.
Allport and Vernon’s study—unusually among American scientists—was graphology-friendly. The persistence of particular characteristics in the script of any individual led them to trust it as a tool in understanding personality, but they were cautious about the kind of graphology that sees a hook on a letter as the sign of a thief. As they wrote in their book Studies in Expressive Movement: “Many of the more superficial graphologists continue to beguile the public with this method.” They came out loudly in favor of the Gestalt school—forest, not trees—and quote Crépieux-Jamin’s analogy with approval: “The study of details of script is to graphology as the study of the alphabet is to the reading of prose.”
An interesting feature of their work was the speculation that—because handwriting does arise directly out of physical movement—the traits a graphologist can pick out most reliably are those with “clearly marked motor concomitants.” Looking at indications of speed or slowness, or at the pressure of the pen on the paper, a graphologist might see qualities like self-confidence (rapidity) or athleticism (heavy pressure). In addition, Allport and Vernon felt that a writer’s social class and educational level are clearly marked in handwriting, and that much can be deduced accordingly from the aesthetics of the letter formations and their spacing, their originality, and the ease or laboriousness with which they’re produced. Like good Gestalt psychologists, they stress the importance of intuition, and grant that some individuals may be supremely gifted in the art of reading personality, able to see aspects of handwriting as pieces of a puzzle that, when put together intelligently, form a convincing picture of a unique human being. Their final take on graphology was a cautious affirmative, with the hope that subsequent studies would illuminate it further.
GRAPHOLOGY TODAY
That torch, however, seems not to have been passed. Graphology is now, as always, widely accepted in Europe (the University of Urbino offers a master’s degree) and also in Israel, where not only employers but landlords, kibbutzim, and matchmakers routinely request handwriting samples from applicants. But it is still viewed with suspicion by the scientific and legal communities in English-speaking countries. According to a 1997 article in the Washington University Law Quarterly, “American courts have traditionally expressed hostility to graphology. Indeed, testimony based on graphology is inadmissible virtually everywhere.… [H]andwriting experts and graphologists in general have enjoyed a very low status in the courts. The general and usually well-justified feeling has been that their findings are largely intuitive and that consequently there are often as many opinions as there are experts in the case”—and nothing has happened since to change that perception. The British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology: both possess “zero validity” in determining personality. The Encyclopedia Britannica flatly calls it a pseudoscience. In The Skeptic’s Dictionary, California philosophy prof Robert Todd Carroll writes, “Since there is no useful theory as to how graphology might work, it is not surprising that there is no empirical evidence that any graphological characteristics significantly correlate with any interesting personality trait.”
Although it has never received the seal of scientific approval, graphology has managed to transcend its shady past and become an underground popular success, viewed positively by a large swath of the public. It’s used by countless corporations as a hiring tool, despite the fact that there is no proven correlation between handwriting and job performance. From 1980 to 1995, when it was discontinued because of lack of enrollment, there was even a Psychology of Handwriting program at New York City’s highly respected New School of Social Research (now called The New School). Graphologists are a staple of high-school graduation festivities, office parties, celebrity events, and conventions, where long lines are evidence of their popularity. Hundreds of graphologists have a presence on the Internet; they range from serious, scholarly practitioners to a woman who offers a smorgasbord of angel readings, ghost-busting, spells, feng shui, hypnosis, and grapho-therapy exercises that can improve your golf swing.
In 1957, there seemed to be a moment of validation for handwriting analysis. Dr. James A. Brussel, a psychiatrist with an interest in the subject, was consulted in the case of the Mad Bomber, who had planted as many as thirty-seven bombs (injuring several people) around New York City. He wrote a series of notes—most of them lambasting Con Edison (“CON EDISON CROOKS, THIS IS FOR YOU”)—to the police and to various newspapers. From them, Brussel deduced—from a combination of factors that included the bomber’s handwriting, his choice of words, and plain old common sense—that the bomber was a clean-shaven, well-educated, middle-aged, paranoid, unmarried, foreign-born male who would be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned—all true.14 In the end, however, the arrest had nothing to do with Brussel’s assessment. The Mad Bomber was identified by a woman going through Con Ed’s archive of employee records: a man named George Metesky, who had been fired in 1931, had written a series of outraged letters to the company, echoing some of the threats in the Mad Bomber’s notes. Metesky was found in Waterbury, Connecticut, and immediately confessed to his crimes. He was declared unfit to stand trial because of insanity, and sent to an asylum.
George Metesky, the Mad Bomber (image credits 3.12)
In approaching anything as widely accepted but scientifically unproven as graphology, scientists and skeptics point to the “Barnum Effect,” named after P.T. “Ther
e’s a sucker born every minute” Barnum. (Unfortunately, Barnum never actually said this.) The phenomenon is also known as the Forer Effect, after the psychologist Bertram R. Forer. What it means is that if an astrologer or a tea-leaf reader or a rumpologist15 tells you that you haven’t fulfilled your true potential, that you often tend to be worried and anxious, that there’s an event from your childhood that still haunts you, and that you’re sometimes dissatisfied with your line of work, you may very well be impressed with the aptness of the findings. (This is also known as “the Aunt Fanny Effect,” meaning, “This could apply to you, me, or my Aunt Fanny!”) In 1948, Forer initiated a series of experiments in which, after his students filled out a personality questionnaire, he gave each one this kind of vague, general, platitudinous analysis. Nearly the entire class found the assessments to be astonishingly accurate.
Some critics point out that handwriting analysis bears the marks of the “sympathetic magic” that forms the basis of many ancient beliefs. If you stuck a pin into a voodoo doll, the person it represented would feel the pain. A bronchiomancer could divine the will of the gods from the pattern made by a set of llama lungs hurled against a flat rock. Astrologers saw a pattern of stars that looked like a bull and declared that anyone born when those stars were at a certain point in the sky would have a bull-like disposition—that is, he or she would be obstinate and willful.
Similarly, graphology does rely, to some extent, on the assumption that handwriting is a visual metaphor for human character: an upward-swooping final stroke on your letters means a big heart, a large capital I means a big ego, and a fat lower loop on your g’s means a big sex drive.
But as Professor Downey wrote, “One may indeed be exceedingly skeptical and yet unwilling to dismiss the whole matter on the ground that graphology is on a par with palmistry, phrenology, or astrology.” There’s a better case to be made for graphology than for other pseudosciences, and graphologists are quick to make it: the stars are millions of light-years away, but our handwriting does emanate from our brains. In fact, graphologists routinely use the term “brain-writing,” a phrase that replaced Abbé Michon’s “soul connection” around 1895, and by which they mean that what we write is directly governed by neurological patterns that travel from the brain to the hand and guide the pen, and that these link up with certain personality traits—the idea that is the ground upon which handwriting analysis stands.
Despite the efforts of Allport and Vernon, Downey and Rice, the brain-hand-ink connection may never have been proved in the laboratory to everyone’s satisfaction, but we sense that it is true: it stands to reason—we feel it in our bones—that if each person’s handwriting is absolutely unique, it therefore must reveal that person’s individual nature. Right?
APPLIED GRAPHOLOGY
I thought it would be instructive to have graphologists analyze the handwriting of three people I know well. I was curious to know what objective professionals would have to say about my friends, but mostly I was curious to see if they would agree with each other, and if they’d get things right.
I found three practicing graphologists who were willing to give me some of their time. Tricia Sabol, from Raleigh, North Carolina, has a law degree from Harvard and is a non-denominational ordained minister. She tells me, “I have not done extensive research into why the principles are what they are—I just learned them, and I apply them.” She adds:
I didn’t originally set out to make a career as a handwriting analyst. I myself had strong doubts about whether or not graphology is valid, but I still pursued it because I thought it would be a cool thing to do. Very rarely do I have someone come back and say that I was totally off base with an analysis. So I still don’t know if it’s valid, but my clients really seem to enjoy it, and I enjoy it as well, and those are the things that matter most to me.
Ralph Zackheim, who lives in Oakland, California, turned to graphology back in the ’80s after an ordeal with the Housemate from Hell. Wondering if there might be some shortcut that would help him discover in advance—before the midnight weeping sessions—who might be a disaster and who would be easy to live with, he took a series of courses and seminars from Ted Widmer—in northern California he’s “the legendary Ted Widmer”16—and thought it all made sense. By then, Ralph had had a raise and no longer needed a housemate, but he pursued graphology because it combined the psychological principles he was comfortable with (he’s the son of a psychologist and a doctor) with his own intuitions about people. Along with a friend from the class, he began doing handwriting interpretation (his preferred term) at parties and other events. By now, he says he’s done several thousand interpretations, and he finds that they have a high degree of validity.
Diana Hall lives in the San Francisco Bay area and makes her living as a graphologist and forensic document examiner, with a part-time “day job” in the medical field. She’s chair of the Graphological Society of San Francisco and assistant director of the International School of Handwriting Sciences (a home study course). Like many, she got her start in graphology when she took Ted Widmer’s course. Then she stepped in when he needed a secretary, apprenticed with him for a couple of years, and worked with him in partnership for another twelve. When Widmer retired, she inherited his client list. For Diana, graphology is based on her “inner computer,” which looks at a writing sample and checks it against everything she has learned. But she says a good graphologist also has to have “a solid grasp of psychology, culture, sociology, etc.—in other words an understanding of people.”
The graphologists I talked to don’t know why the symbolism of one’s handwriting is an unconscious projection of the inner self, or exactly how it can reveal introversion or ambition or family problems. They can’t really explain it, either physiologically or psychologically. They’re not aware of any research that would refute the skeptics. And none of them cares. All Diana and Tricia and Ralph know is that it seems to work.
The three graphologists requested that the writing samples be written ad lib, “from the heart,” not copied from a book or memorized. Although this seemed dubious, I let the graphologists call the shots, but my lab-rat friends did feel that some of their writing was personal enough to provide a few clues. One took the opportunity to wax nostalgic about growing up in New Hampshire, which immediately typed him as a reflective person of a certain age.
Another’s short homey notes about her zinnia seedlings also included lingonberry martinis with her husband and a smoked-pork dinner she was making for a crowd—all indicating a rather upscale, sophisticated life.
Each volunteer was required to close with a signature, which, because it’s seen by others, represents the way a person wishes to be perceived. If it’s similar to the rest of the writing, it indicates a healthy and balanced self-image—but often it’s radically different.17 So it’s important in any handwriting analysis. But people’s names can also disclose their gender to the graphologist.
I sent my samples to Tricia, Diana, and Ralph, and all three returned them with extensive and thoughtful commentary. And, even as my guinea pigs and I tried to keep our skepticism pumped up, and the Forer Effect in mind, we were often impressed with the accuracy of the analyses—though there were some caveats, too. We went over the comments pretty much line by line, and rated each insight. The average was 65 percent on target, 12 percent dead wrong, and 23 percent Aunt Fanny.
It seemed unfair to subject my three friends to scrutiny without going under the graphological knife myself, so I dug out samples of my handwriting from age ten to very recently and passed them on to my panel of experts.
My handwriting through the ages reveals me to be empathic, intuitive, and understanding of others—something I fervently hope is true—as well as ambitious, persistent, occasionally sarcastic (this is all about the way I cross my t’s), and slightly impatient (moi?). But dang it, at least I’m open to new ideas and tolerant of others’ views! I have the doggish (my dog Fanny?) qualities of loyalty and dependability as well as t
he catty ones of mild introversion and the frequent need to be alone. I don’t like to waste time and don’t like delay, and I have strong powers of concentration, with the ability “to focus exclusively on a task and exclude all distracting influences.” My graphologists did get a few things backward: I wasn’t more outgoing as a child than I am now—far from it. The shyness, like the good penmanship, has mostly vanished. Still, though Aunt Fanny again made a few cameo appearances, I was impressed with the accuracy of the self-portrait that crept into my handwriting. I’d have to agree with my guinea pigs and say the graphologists’ observations were right about two thirds of the time.
So where does that leave us? Graphology has no scientific validity—according to the skeptics, these scores aren’t much better than those of an untrained observer; Binet recorded approximately the same percentages in 1906—and yet my small sample of volunteers was impressed with the findings. It has a much higher efficacy rate than, say, prayer, which in a $2.4 million study (funded by the U.S. government) at the Mayo Clinic in 2001 was found to have zero effect on death rates, heart attacks, and strokes in more than 1,800 heart bypass surgery patients. And it’s way better than my own secret formula for betting on the Kentucky Derby (not to be disclosed here), which works less than 10 percent of the time.
Graphology, of course, depends on the existence of handwriting for its survival. Not much can be inferred from the way we type, give or take a few grammatical errors and Freudian slips—at least not yet. Maybe, as the keyboard takes over our lives, some modern-day Abbé Michon will devise a way of reading character through our choice of fonts and use of emoticons.
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