Cartoon of the Week

Glen LeLievre

Graphology is a load of crap

... however, if the handwriting on a prescription is illegible, you have a good doctor, and if your job applicant's writing is uneven and they overuse phrases like "I really love you", they are drunk.

A reader wrote to Jim Bright (professor of career education and development at ANU) who writes a column in My Career in Saturday editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and asked, "Do you see how it (graphology) forms a useful tool in recruitment? Would you professionally agree it may have a place in the industry?"

Bright's reply was a ripper.

Bright noted that:

* on the British Institute of Graphologists' website, it is noted that "large writing can mean almost anything connected with greatness."

* according to a BBC report in 2005, about 3000 businesses in Britain use graphology in their recruitment processes.

* in one well-known example, graphologists made a series of confident interpretations about "Tony Blair's writing", only to later discover it was Bill Clinton's.

The British Psychological Society conducted a thorough review of the ability of graphology (and other techniques) to determine personality. It concluded it had "zero validity".

One absurd response to this finding was that graphology's French heritage might have led to a British bias. Well, bad news, the latest peer-reviewed study to damn graphology, which was conducted last year, was French.

The reader claims graphology may not predict intelligence but might be useful in predicting emotional performance.

Bright's conclusion: There is no evidence to support this contention. There is a caveat, however. If the handwriting on a prescription is illegible, you have a good doctor, and if your job applicant's writing is uneven and they overuse phrases like "I really love you", they are drunk. Other than that, all the reliable peer-reviewed evidence concludes that graphology is, to put it technically, a load of crap. Click: Boom. Boom.

Source: My Career, SMH, November 7-8, 2009