Rorschach Inkblot test - any use in academic or career counseling?

[symbolipoint]

TL;DR Summary

Any idea if Rorschach Inkblot tests be any good for academic advising or career advising?

This question is faulty from the start yet I wonder and ask anyway.

Might the Rorschach Inkblot Tests be any use or meaningful for academic guidance or advising or for career guidance or advising? Might the tests be predictive of temperament for future work in sciences, engineering, or anything else?

 

[.Scott]

My guess is that you've already read the wiki article.

Engineers in general and software engineers in particular are a very diverse bunch. And I discovered early on, that programmers have diverse ways of analyzing and attacking coding problems - adapting their techniques to their specific abilities and disabilities in areas such as memory, interests, logic, hearing, motor skills, and eye sight.

I don't doubt that with sufficient research, you could discover some correlations between future career success and interpretations of some ambiguous images. But, all the more direct methods would be far better predictors - and a major predictor is the what resources are available is one's attempt to develop the skills.

This tends to be an imagination-limited question. Given enough imagination, perhaps you could find a "yes".
But my answer is "not really".

Besides, those are clearly not butterflies, they're elements of the FFT algorithm.

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Edited to add this:

So I just took an online version of the common 10-slide Rorschach test
I believe this is the Exner version, which is the most researched one.
I then compared what I saw with what is typical.
The results certainly provide no direct answer to your question, but it may extend your imagination. And as I said, this is a very imagination-limited question:

Everything I saw was right in line with the mainstream responses. But in almost all cases I attempted to look for "material" (crystal, rock, powder, whatever), activity (carrying a basket), and assemblies or structures (trying to get all the elements involved in the picture).

But would I have responded the same way 50+years ago before becoming involved in data processing? I would not even dare guess.

 

[Laroxe]

The Rorschach Test was developed in 1921 and intended to be used as a tool to help in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Encouraging a patient to try and give meaning to nondescript images was a way of eliciting evidence of thought disorder, so it was a diagnostic tool. Unfortunately, the type of psychological theories that dominated psychiatry were based on psychoanalysis, and so unsurprisingly more and more was read into the meanings people gave to the inkblots. Attempts to provide standardised interpretation and make the whole thing appear to be objective lead to it being adopted as some sort of personality inventory.

It is worth noting that personality psychology generally has a great many problems in terms of validity and reliability, the number of theories and tests are a good indication of these problems. In the UK and most of Europe, personality testing has fallen out of favour, but it continues to be widely used in the USA. Psychologists successfully sold the various ideas to managers, and tests are often (mis)used in career planning and job selection.

Of the very large number of tools available to test personality, most of which lack any credible link to psychological models, which can be used to assign people to some spurious category, the Rorschach inkblot test stands out for having an almost total lack of credibility. It is however great fun at parties and is best treated as a form of entertainment. In the USA where it is more likely to be seen and in some cases treated seriously, even in court cases there have been calls for it to be formally banned.

I may seem to be a little harsh in my comments, but I suppose it might be useful in predicting gullibility. The test is still available and can be completed at the link, the note on participation is telling.
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/HEMCR/