By Barry L. Beyerstein, Ph.D. from http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/grapho.html

To the casual observer, handwriting analysis enjoys greater plausibility than other occult or pseudoscientific ways of reading personality. Take astrology or palmistry, for instance. It is hard for a thinking person today to imagine how the stars or creases on the palm could affect human behavior. But it seems at least possible that, inasmuch as writing is a form of expressive behavior, it might reveal something about ourselves. After all, our mannerisms and choice of clothing, jewelry, and hair styles seem to do so -- at least to some degree. Moreover, because writing and personality are both controlled by the brain, the suggestion that they could be related doesn't seem inherently absurd. And since both personality and handwriting are undeniably idiosyncratic, many consider it reasonable that one might reflect the other. Nonetheless, despite their surface plausibility each of these arguments is seriously flawed.

Graphologists have largely convinced an uninformed public that their craft is a scientifically respectable way of assessing personality, aptitudes, and predilections. This is reinforced by the unfortunate fact that many large corporations do consult graphologists. Similarly, many people assume that graphology must be legitimate because it has occasionally been accepted in court. And many skeptics have accepted free offers to have their writing analyzed and found, to their surprise, that the portrayal seemed remarkably accurate.

This article deals with each of these areas. Following a brief historical introduction, I shall present the logical and scientific objections to graphology. I shall then attempt to explain why a practice that consistently fails scientific tests can seem so convincing to intelligent people who run across it in everyday settings.

Graphology is the allegedly scientific practice of determining people's psychological, social, occupational, and medical attributes from the configuration of their letters, lines, and paragraphs on a page. Graphologists strenuously deny (though there is evidence to the contrary) that they attend to the contents of the scripts they scrutinize. They claim to reveal character traits and state of health solely from the form and distribution of the writing itself. If graphologists claimed nothing more than that cultured people might write with a cultivated hand, or that stingy people fill every corner of the page to avoid wasting paper, there would be little dispute. But the assertion is not merely that tidy people write neatly (which isn't always the case anyway) -- they claim handwriting reveals the larceny in your heart.

The term "Graphoanalysis" is the registered trademark of a particular school of handwriting analysis, the International Graphoanalysis Society, of Chicago, Illinois. In this chapter "graphology" and "handwriting analysis" will be used interchangeably but "Graphoanalysis" or "Graphoanalyst" will refer only to followers of the Chicago school. Founded in 1929, it is the best-established of the training organizations. It offers mail-order courses, publishes its own journal, and confers official-sounding certification on its graduates. Graphoanalysts are also the most vocal in claiming scientific status while denying that of their rivals .

Such backbiting among graphological factions is frequent. There are over thirty graphological societies in the U.S. alone, with many using methods that a proponent says are "not easily combined with other systems."  This lack of standardization is compounded by the fact that many local practitioners make up their own intuitive schemes. While there are some concepts common to most systems of handwriting analysis, there are equally notable disputes as to what the various "signs" mean. Take, for instance, two books by internationally known graphologists that I reviewed: one considers a certain way of crossing t's indicative of a vicious, sadistic temperament, the other says it's a sign of a practical joker. Which do you hope is advising your boss?

Graphology is a branch of the large, diverse group of practices collectively known as "character reading." Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by human variability and the uniqueness of the individual. It is on this basis that we apportion life's richest prizes and most dreadful punishments. Obviously, those whose fates hang in the balance have a strong incentive to present a favorable face to the world, and for that reason, hucksters promising to cut through what is euphemistically called "impression management" have always found an eager clientele. Think of the advantages if potential employers, landlords, spouses, business associates, or courts of law could quickly and accurately reveal "what someone is really like." At various times, it has been assumed that such a window on anyone's inner make-up could be gained by interpreting the positions of the stars (astrology), the features of the face (physiognomy), the lines on the hand (palmistry), bumps on the head (phrenology), and the shape and distribution of handwriting (graphology). Although modern graphologists have tried to disavow all links to their occult cousins, handwriting analysis, in its origins, its underlying rationale, and its New Age affiliations, retains obvious ties to these magical character reading methods  Readers seeking a more detailed history of graphology should consult the chapter by Nickell  on which the following brief summary is based.

There are ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman, as well as early Jewish and Christian ancestors of graphology, but its modern incarnation can be traced to the speculations of the seventeenth-century Italian physician, Camillo Baldi. The most recognizable forebears of current devotees, however, are to be found among an influential group of Catholic clergy in nineteenth-century France. A disciple of that circle, Abb Jean-Hippolyte Michon, coined the term "graphology" and, in Paris in 1871, founded The Society of Graphology. Michon's several books remain influential today. He is the progenitor of the so-called "analytic" approach which ascribes specific traits to people based on isolated "signs" in writing, such as placement of dots on i's and crossbars on t's. Michon's student, Crepieux-Jamin, broke with his master to become the founder of what is known today as the "holistic" or "gestalt" approach. Rather than attending to individual elements of letters, etc., Crepieux-Jamin advocated a more intuitive, impressionistic perusal whereby the analyst absorbs an overall "feel" for the writer by a vague sort of "resonance" with the script as a whole. Partisans of the analytic and the holistic approaches have perpetuated this split to the present day.

French graphologists continued to dominate the field until the early twentieth century when they started to be eclipsed by German-speaking authors. At that time, figures such as Preyer, Meyer, Klages, Pulver, and Teltscher began to suggest that writing was a sub-species of expressive movement and that mental processes and emotionality could be read by analyzing this kind of psychomotor behavior. Realizing that the brain is responsible for both psychological traits and the control of writing, they attempted to justify their personality readings with the assertion that "handwriting is brainwriting." This still remains graphology's most prevalent defensive cliché (see below).

In the 1930s, the Czech-English graphologist Saudek, attempted to introduce more rigorous, mechanized ways of measuring writing movements. Increasing the precision of measures that are of doubtful value in the first place must rank as a dubious contribution, however. Early in this century, graphological speculation began to emerge in North America. Following Downey in 1919 and the arrival of the European emigre Klara Roman, Americans such as M.N. Bunker  gradually came to the fore. In 1929, Bunker founded the International Graphoanalysis Society. Handwriting analysis by all estimates continues to grow in popularity throughout North America and Europe but it seems to enjoy the greatest appeal among employers in France and Israel. In modern China, reading personality from calligraphy seems not to have permeated official circles but it remains a popular folk superstition .

Present-day graphologists maintain that their venerable ancestors have taken graphology well beyond its occult beginnings when itinerant conjurers wandered the countryside practicing the art. Be that as it may, perusal of the latest graphology texts reveals that the seminal concepts remain precisely what they were in the beginning. Claims of scientific improvements notwithstanding, my review of dozens of books touted by well-known graphologists shows that, like all other systems of augury or divination, the underpinnings of graphology remain the ancient principles of sympathetic magic . I should note in passing that it is not encouraging when aspirants to scientific status respond to critics' requests for the technical treatises of their trade with the same works hawked by popular magazines and New Age booksellers. Asked for supporting evidence, one prominent graphologist referred me to a laudatory article in Playboy. A few pro-graphology articles have made it into refereed journals , but on balance, they fall far short of establishing the case, theoretically  or empirically .

The essence of all magical thinking is sympathetic correspondence, i.e., "like begets like." This is also known in mystical lore as "The Law of Similarity." If two things can be associated mentally, they allegedly enjoy a certain "sympathy" or "resonance." Either can then be used to reveal or influence the other via their magical interconnectedness. For example, sympathy can be established through a conceptual link such as ownership. This supposedly allows a psychic to describe someone who owned an object by absorbing the "vibrations" he or she imparted to it. Similar beliefs in mind over matter are apparent among tribes who hope to assure a successful hunt by symbolically "slaying" wooden models of their prey and voodoo priests who think they can injure adversaries by mutilating their effigies.

Astrology provides a classic example of how sympathetic magic is used to ascribe attributes to strangers. As we shall see, the parallels with graphology are striking. Astrology arose in the dim past when observers of the night sky were reminded of crabs, bulls, twins, etc., by various clusters of stars. There was nothing inevitable about those particular associations and different cultures mentally superimposed different objects on the same constellations. Nonetheless, for historical reasons, the currently accepted ones have survived [9]. In essence, astrology boils down to the following: (a) The stellar configuration reminds me of a bull (i.e., "Taurus"); (b) Bulls are plodding, stubborn, and obdurate; and (c) Therefore, those born with this constellation in the appropriate position are condemned, by sympathetic infusion of these bull-like qualities, to grow up to be dull, loutish drudges as well.

Elsewhere  I have presented numerous examples to show that very latest graphological celebrities still rely on these same principles of sympathetic magic to derive a writer's attributes from his or her script. Graphologists have done their best to disguise this fact by embedding their speculations in modern-sounding psychobabble, but one need only compare their "signs" with the traits they supposedly denote to see that the basis of the ascriptions is entirely allegorical. Since my critique appeared, I have debated many graphologists; none has been able to refute this claim. Space permits me to provide only a few examples of graphological augury here (for complete citations and verbatim excerpts, see my critique . The following are selected from texts highly recommended by practicing graphologists.

The founders of every school of graphology began with the implicit assumption that whatever metaphors the features of an individual's script bring to mind are necessarily descriptive of the writer as well. This kind of free association and symbolic interpretation underlies all divining practices . This remains as true of graphology today as it was when ancient oracles foretold the fates of kings by assuming that mental associations triggered by the shapes of animal entrails would be re-enacted in the affairs of the realm. In another old auguring practice, molybdomancy, the oracle would drop molten lead on a flat surface and interpret the shape it assumed as it solidified -- the blob, it seems, magically adopts the shape of things to come. After perusing the following examples, you can decide for yourself whether graphology has really abandoned its roots in divination.

Note the allegorical thinking in these representative samples culled from graphology textbooks and articles. Wide spacing between words supposedly denotes someone who does not mix easily and is therefore prone to be isolated and lonely. Conversely, writers who crowd their words together are so desperate for companionship that they are indiscriminate in choosing their friends. Writers whose lines drift upward are "uplifting" optimists while those whose lines sag downward are pessimists who constantly feel they are being dragged down. People who draw the upper, middle, and lower sections of their letters equally large have "a good sense of proportion." Those with variable letter slants are unpredictable, or, as one graphologist put it, they are people with "changing inclinations." Writers of unusually large capital I's have large egos and those who write big, "think big." A past president of a major US graphological association asserts that if a married woman pens her signature with larger capitals on her given name than on her husband's surname, she betrays an unhappy marriage. One of Canada's most prominent handwriting gurus describes a writer with crosses on his t's that reminded her of whips, thus revealing his sadistic nature. On the health front, my informants claimed that low writing pressure signals low blood pressure and ragged upper loops are diagnostic of heart disease. And a break between upper and lower portions of letters is a sure sign of back problems. My favorite ascription, though, is the widely held belief in the graphological community that large, bulbous loops on g's, y's, etc. -- i.e., ones that dangle lasciviously below the lines -- reveal a strong sex drive. Divination by sympathetic magic, or what? At least one can barbecue the ox after examining its entrails.

All the foregoing would be touchingly naive, even comical, were it not for the fact that these self- styled experts offer advice where it can seriously affect people's reputations, well-being, and economic status. For instance, in Vancouver, British Columbia, a prominent graphologist offered to identify, secretly, for preemptive action by the school board, the actual and potential sexual molesters in the local teaching ranks . Others have advised financial institutions on the credit-worthiness of borrowers and many civic governments and large corporations admit to consulting handwriting analysts for pre-employment screening. Graphologists also say they are competent to help select marriage partners and there have been press reports that at least one member of Canada's National Parole Board was privately consulting her graphologist sister to help select those prisoners who were safe to release. Similarly, a judge in Denver, Colorado, was reported to have sentenced a convict to undergo graphotherapy.

Graphologists with whom I have dealt have had no compunctions about predicting which employees would steal from the corporation, betray proprietary secrets, or become closet alcoholics or drug abusers. I was told by one graphologist that he has a "100% foolproof way" of determining who will become violent on the job. Handwriting analysts have offered to expose philandering spouses from writing samples, and where the police will take them seriously, they are eager to finger supposed criminals. One graphology company offers courses for therapists on how to tell if writers have repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Most shocking of all, many graphologists advertise, as a unique benefit of their services, that inquisitive third parties can submit a sample of writing for analysis and act upon the results, without the writer ever knowing the evaluation took place.

Many graphologists are not been shy about broadcasting their potentially damaging assessments. For instance, when I have asked for evidence that graphology works, I have frequently been shown analyses with names still attached. When my brother and I assisted the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association in trying to dissuade a nearby municipality from continuing to use a graphologist's services, the graphologist, in defending himself before city council, displayed a shocking disregard for the standards of confidentiality we have the right to expect when personnel matters are discussed in public.

Because the attributions are based on symbolism and free association, different schools disagree about which signs are tokens of which traits (just as literary critics endlessly debate the "real meaning" of symbolism in poetry). Thus, you as a prospective employee or borrower could have your reputation blackened if you were unfortunate enough to be secretly assessed by a graphologist of one persuasion but if, by the luck of the draw, your "true nature" was divined by a disciple of another school, you might have sailed through with ease.

Obviously, when the life prospects of unsuspecting people are involved, the use of what would otherwise be a harmless party amusement, ceases to be a laughing matter. To our dismay, when we asked two lawyers (Robert Carswell  from Canada and John Reagh  from the U.S.) to suggest what constitutional and statutory provisions might apply, they agreed that, in both countries, citizens enjoy very few protections if a private employer decides to consult a graphologist. (The picture is slightly better in some jurisdictions if government hiring is involved.) We can take action against those who discriminate against Blacks, Jews, or women, but it is apparently acceptable if corporations refuse a position or a loan to someone whose only sin is crossing t's in an odd way.