Rorschach Inkblot Test: The most famous psychological test

About the Rorschach Inkblot Test

Hermann Rorschach was a young Swiss psychiatrist working at the Krombach Mental Hospital in Switzerland. He was interested in whether the way patients perceived ambiguous visual stimuli reflected underlying personality structure and mental illness. From 1917 to 1921 he developed and tested a set of ink-blot cards designed to elicit revealing perceptual responses.

Rorschach's 1921 book Psychodiagnostik introduced 10 carefully-designed inkblots (5 black/grey, 2 with red elements, 3 with multiple colors). Each card was administered with a standard procedure: 'What might this be? What does it look like to you?' Responses were scored on several dimensions including location (which part of the blot triggered the response), determinants (form, color, movement, etc.), content (animal, human, anatomy, etc.), and popularity (how common the response is).

Rorschach died just nine months after publication, at age 37, from peritonitis following appendicitis. His test took on a life of its own. Through the 20th century various scoring systems competed (Klopfer 1942, Beck 1944, Exner Comprehensive System 1974, R-PAS 2011). The Rorschach remained one of the most-administered psychological tests for nearly a century. Its scientific validity has been heavily debated; modern R-PAS is the most empirically supported version.

The 10 inkblots themselves are perhaps the most recognizable visual stimuli in psychology. They have appeared in countless films, novels, comic books (most famously as Rorschach in Watchmen), psychology textbooks, and popular culture. The original 1921 images are public domain and freely viewable.

The 1 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Rorschach, H. (1921). Psychodiagnostik. Bern: Bircher. English translation by Lemkau & Kronenberg, 1942.

Hermann Rorschach died in 1922 (Switzerland), so the 1921 inkblots themselves entered the public domain decades ago. Modern scoring systems (Comprehensive System, R-PAS) and stimulus materials manufactured by Hogrefe Verlag remain under various copyrights, but the original 10 ink-blot images are freely reproducible and widely available. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/psychodiagnostic0000hror.