Can a pseudoscience ever truly disappear? Over the course of human history, we have made many attempts at explaining the world around us, and while some of these guesses were eventually confirmed through rigorous scientific experimentation, many of our hypotheses were shown to be wrong, yet some survived. They became belief systems with a patina of scientific credibility applied on top. It still surprises me that astrology, a clear pseudoscience which has been firmly supplanted by both astronomy and human psychology, remains popular today.
Even the pseudosciences that were debunked out of existence can rise from the grave decades later to haunt a new generation that is naïve to it. But what if this fake science relies on something we do less and less? Graphology is a discipline, said to be scientific, which analyzes someone’s handwriting to make predictions about their personality. Do you put little hooks at the ends of your S’s? Some graphologists will conclude you have a tendency to steal things. Beyond personality divination, graphology has been used to help people find a compatible mate, diagnose an illness, or inform an employer if an applicant is the right fit for the job.
Even though we handwrite less and type more, graphology has not died. It seems to be doing what it has always done: migrated.
Pardon my French writing
Handwriting analysis goes back centuries and is part of a larger group of divination tools we might rightly look at with puzzlement today. You may be familiar with the reading of tea leaves, but have you ever heard of omphalomancy? It’s the mistaken belief that the size and shape of the belly button can explain behaviour. There’s also metoposcopy or reading the wrinkles on someone’s forehead to predict their personality, as well as onychomancy, where fingernails are covered in oil to see how each part reflects the light and to divine someone’s future. At this point, tying someone’s handwriting to their personality seems downright plausible by comparison. After all, both are governed by the brain.
While there was interest in the telltale signs of handwriting in our early history, it wasn’t until 1622 that we saw the first manual on the subject, written by Camillo Baldi and published in Bologna. But the name “graphology” wouldn’t come about until 1871, from the pen of Jean-Hippolyte Michon, a Frenchman who gave up the priesthood to become a scientist and archaeologist. Michon believed in a one-to-one relationship between a specific feature of someone’s handwriting and a personality trait. In his book Système de graphologie, he writes that it is our soul that directly writes and speaks. What is our soul saying? According to Michon, if you forget to cross a small T, it is a very significant omission: “it gives us,” he writes in French, “the absence of will.” Basically, you are weak. King Louis XVI is given as an example. If you cross your T so strongly that you leave the pen to drip at the end, creating a club, warning: you are expressing an inner violence.
Michon’s pupil, Jules Crépieux-Jamin, broke away from his mentor. To him, you couldn’t simply state that a writing feature like the cross on a T always carried the same meaning. You had to take a holistic perspective and use your instinct. Already, we are witnessing a schism within graphology which would only worsen as the decades flew by. Germany was the next hotbed of handwriting analysis, and from there it took over Europe. At some point in the early 20th century, graphology crossed the pond and arrived in America. And when continental graphologists were fleeing the Nazis, they brought their discipline over to the United Kingdom.
Employers started secretly relying on graphologists to evaluate the handwriting of potential employees. In the United States, this practice dates back to as early as 1965. This has been argued as unfair, potentially discriminatory, and as a violation of a job applicant’s right to privacy. Candidates would be asked to fill out an application by hand and this document would be submitted to a so-called expert, who was paid (sometimes handsomely) to report back on the applicant’s personality. As employee turnover rates accelerated in the second half of the 20th century, employers saw graphology as a way to help them choose employees who would stay longer, and it was later influenced by the trendiness of New Age practices which were full of divinatory tools like it. In the U.S., it also became a way to go around the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which prohibited private employers from putting their job applicants through a lie detector test. Fine, said many corporations. We’ll ask a graphologist instead: how honest is our candidate based on their handwriting?
At the extreme end of graphology, we see graphotherapists who claim that you can change your personality by changing your handwriting. This belief does away with the scientific roleplay and exposes the foundation of the practice: sympathetic magic. One of humanity’s really old ideas is that like begets like: if you keep a phallic object or the statue of a pregnant woman in your house, it will make you more fertile, for example. Astrology relies a lot on sympathetic magic. Because the planet Mars appears red, it reminds us of blood, and thus violence; therefore, we call the planet “Mars” after the Roman god of war and claim that its presence in the sky at the time of our birth holds significance.
Through sympathetic magic, causes and effects become interchangeable: the way in which you write the letter T is a consequence of your violent impulses, but if you change how you write, the arrow of causation will be reversed. You will be cured of your inner violence. This is magical thinking, pure and simple.
Graphology has undergone the pressure-cooker test of science and failed it miserably, but its adherents always have an out.
Special pleading
In 2009, graphology was compared to the Big Five Questionnaire, which evaluates people on the Big Five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Not only were the two graphologists really bad at inferring these five personality traits, they frequently disagreed with each other. This can be explained in part by the fact that the French schism in graphology has widened, with multiple schools teaching their own interpretations of what crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s really means.
Two decades earlier, a meta-analysis of 17 graphology studies was published. In total, the studies had included 63 graphologists and 51 non-graphologists acting as controls, with both groups having looked at a sum of 1,223 handwritten texts. The overall result was bleak: graphologists did no better than non-graphologists. In fact, when the non-graphologists were psychologists, they did better on average than handwriting experts.
To be sure, some studies are in the graphologists’ favour, but what we see is typical of pseudosciences: small, deeply flawed studies show promise, while larger, more rigorous experiments yield negative results. So how do graphologists respond to this? Given that their reputation is at stake, they turn to special pleading, much like psychics do. A set of two studies published in 1986 provides a clear example.
Since graphology was more widespread in Israel than any other personality test and was commonly used by employers, Israeli researchers decided to put it to the test. They gave five graphologists (three of whom were quite famous) handwritten scripts in Hebrew from 40 adult men. The graphologists were asked to predict what the men did for a living. No graphologist was able to predict a single writer’s profession to a significant degree.
When these so-called experts were told how poorly they had performed, some resorted to special pleading: we can infer personality, they argued, and professional tendencies, but just because you have a particular job, it doesn’t mean you are well suited for it. The problem? Those 40 men had been well chosen: they had worked their entire career in one profession and for at least a decade, had said to be greatly satisfied in their career choice, and were considered success stories by their colleagues and clients. Oops.
When the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association wrote about the concerning use of graphologists by the city of Chilliwack, which in the 1980s had spent 11,700$ on their services, they reported that one graphologist had admitted after the fact that it was more of an art form than a science. The Civil Liberties Association was biting in its report: “We hope that they are equally candid with their prospective clients.” Indeed, this hot-and-cold attitude toward science is something we also see with astrology: its fans are quick to be mesmerized by the mathematical-looking star charts, but when pushed they are equally quick to say they know astrology is not scientific. It is merely “useful.”
Yet despite these refutations, some will continue to claim that graphology works, and there are good reasons for that.
Graphology Is a Gemini Sun with Pisces Rising
I had to fold a lot of sheets of paper and seal a lot of envelopes, but it was worth it.
Standing in front of a room full of students, I told them that the director of our Office dabbled in astrology and that it really worked. Once we were done distributing their personal horoscope in a sealed envelope adorned with their astrological sign, they opened it up and read it. By show of hands, they pretty much all agreed that it was a good fit.
Then I asked them to read their neighbour’s.
That’s the moment that made it worth the effort. They had all received the exact same horoscope.
Many skeptics and teachers have done this trick to demonstrate the Forer effect. It’s when you read a vague statement but believe that it holds special meaning for you. This is facilitated by the use of Barnum statements, named after P.T. Barnum, the showman who is often said to have observed that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” What’s a Barnum statement? “Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.” Most people will identify with this. And, yes, you have correctly realized that these sorts of, “You are this, but also that,” are the bread and butter of newspaper horoscopes.
Graphology works in the same way. You can pick up from a vague report what really fits you and forget the rest because it’s usually ambiguous enough. “Your A’s tell me you are quite generous, but the way in which you write your G’s tell me you can be a bit stingy at times.” Aren’t we all?
This is related to the practice of cold reading which psychics use: make vague enough pronouncements until you get a hit. If you want to bring up a dead relative, ask about a “J” or “M” name, as these are very common in English. But there’s also hot reading, where the practitioner knows information about their client. This happens a lot in graphology and is often encouraged by its members. They will say that simply asking someone to transcribe a piece of writing will not work; they need an original text that comes from them, often full of biographical information. With no graphology training, I too can infer clues about a writer based on their writing style, grammatical errors, country-specific spellings, and details about their personal lives. The content does the talking, not the letters. That is probably why psychologists do better than graphologists when analyzing original texts penned by anonymous authors.
As for the basic plausibility of graphology—that “handwriting is brainwriting,” as many of its practitioners put it—there is no more reason to think that your personality expresses itself clearly in the style of your letters than to think that your gait is influenced by your personality in obvious ways. As the late professor of psychology and vocal critic of graphology Barry Beyerstein once put it, is walking brainstepping? “Vomiting has an associated center in the brain too,” he wrote. “Does that justify using individual regurgitation styles to assess someone’s intimate make-up?”
Plus, we learn handwriting in school: that training will have a bigger impact on how we shape our letters than our personality.
There are a few legitimate uses of handwriting analysis. In neurology, it can be used to detect certain forms of motor impairments, and good forensic document examiners can say if two different texts came from the same writer but they can’t make proclamations about that person’s honesty based on how they draw their A’s.
Yet, even graphology can’t do much with a keyboard. As we move away from the pen, will this pseudoscientific practice simply disappear or will it convince young people to pick up an antiquated writing instrument to reveal a side of themselves hidden by modern technology? It already migrated from Italy to France to Germany and, from there, to the rest of the Western world. Now, it seems to be having a moment in South Asia.
On YouTube, the majority of recently uploaded videos on the topic seem to come from India, where graphology is promoted as a potential business that can make you rich. One guy also offers to tell you how to choose the “right and lucky” wristwatch to bring about success.
All you need is to follow his instructions to the letter.
Take-home message:
- Graphology is a pseudoscientific discipline that claims to infer personality traits (and more) from how someone shapes their letters when writing by hand
- In rigorous scientific studies, graphologists do very poorly at inferring personality, often disagree with each other on interpretation, and do no better than non-experts
- Graphology often appears to work due to the vague statements made by its practitioners, which work like horoscopes or psychic readings
