What Can Your Handwriting Really Say About You?
Graphology claims to reveal character traits like honesty, ambition, or mood just from the way someone forms their letters. More than 200 independent scientific studies have since discredited this statement (Dean, 1992; Beyerstein, 1990).
One of the most well-known critics of graphology, psychiatrist Raj Persaud, wrote in The Guardian that the field “is just as unscientific and irrelevant as phrenology” (The Guardian, 2005).
In one experiment by psychologists Roy King and Derek Koehler, students were asked to match random handwriting samples to personality descriptions. Even though the pairings were fake, the students still “saw” connections. Their expectations influenced what they thought they saw (King & Koehler, 2000).
What Handwriting Can Tell Us
- Handwriting can reflect issues with fine motor skills, tremors, or even neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease. For example, doctors have used writing samples as one tool to detect early signs of degeneration (Drotár et al., 2014).
- Your handwriting may change temporarily if you're tired, rushed, or stressed—sloppier writing, heavier pressure, or erratic spacing. But that’s more about your state than your traits.
- The way you form letters can hint at the time or country in which you learned to write. Cursive vs. print, loopy or blocky letters all reflect cultural and educational trends.
Forensics:
Unlike graphology, forensic document examination is used in courts and criminal investigations. It's not about who you are; it's about whether you wrote something.
Experts compare characteristics like slant, pressure, spacing, and stroke order to determine if two handwriting samples came from the same person. It’s used to verify signatures, detect forgeries, or analyze threats. However, even forensic handwriting analysis isn't flawless. It's still considered supporting evidence, not a definitive identification method (Found & Rogers, 2005).
- Persaud, R. (2005). Writing wrongs: Graphology has been repeatedly debunked by scientific tests. The Guardian. Link
- King, R., & Koehler, D. J. (2000). Illusory correlations in graphological inference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
- Dean, G. (1992). The Bottom Line: Effect Size. The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.
- Drotár, P., Mekyska, J., Rektorová, I., Masarová, L., Smékal, Z., & Faundez-Zanuy, M. (2014). Analysis of in-air movement in handwriting: A new feature for Parkinson’s disease handwriting characterization. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.
- Found, B., & Rogers, D. (2005). The probative character of forensic handwriting examiners’ identification and elimination opinions on questioned signatures. Forensic Science International.
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This is a very interesting topic and after going through your post I can understand how the experiment was more so informed by peoples ideas and expectations rather than actual facts for depicting hand writing styles to match personalities. Especially when it's said it was fake and people will assume and read a certain type of writing style and in their head come up with why its like that for whatever reason. Good job on the post!
ReplyDeleteI find this topic very interesting because I know a lot of tv shows like to use handwriting as like a gotta moment. But I think it is really cool to be able to see the handwriting and spacing to be able to tell apart someone writing style. Great job on the post !
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to believe that people cling to things that are so easily disproven. I liked how you included what handwriting analysis can detect, like motor function and neurological issues. It feels like every few years there's a new (pseudoscientific) personality test ready to tell us who we really are -- as if we don't already know that. Maybe I'm wrong, but I firmly believe that the best way of determining someone's personality is and always will be actually taking the time to get to know them.
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