[HN Gopher] Do ambiguous images provide psychological insights? ...
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Do ambiguous images provide psychological insights? Testing a
popular claim
Author : thinkingemote
Score : 23 points
Date : 2025-02-20 10:29 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (peerj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (peerj.com)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Isn't this the whole point of Rorschach tests? They are
| controversial, but still have professional support.
| dwringer wrote:
| A key point of Rorschach tests is that they are always the same
| plates, so there is a large body of literature and case studies
| specific to interpretations of each one. I think that like any
| sort of psychological inventory the results are extremely
| context dependent and require a trained professional to
| interpret. The trending stuff on social media as mentioned in
| the article strikes me as more akin to the pseudoscientific
| misappropriation of things like the MBTI to compare different
| people in a non-clinical setting, and AFAIU there is really no
| scientific basis for any such thing.
| analog31 wrote:
| An interesting quality of the images is that they all have a
| high degree of symmetry, which is only found in living things.
| So there is a built in bias.
| TransAtlToonz wrote:
| Lack of empirical support does not imply empirical support of no
| insight. In fact, it seems like you can reasonably draw whatever
| conclusion you please with about equivalent (zero) evidence.
| Calling these "myths" seems like a bit of a stretch--perhaps
| "popular conception" might be more accurate.
| abeppu wrote:
| This seems sketchy in that they're giving themselves N*M
| opportunities to find significant correlations, which they
| acknowledge -- but with a bias that a significant correlation is
| not expected to be spurious if it aligns with a claim previously
| made elsewhere.
|
| > Some of the additional statistically significant findings
| (e.g., the perception of Rubin's Vase and openness, the Horse-
| Seal and intuitive decision making, and the Duck-Rabbit and
| extraversion and conscientiousness) appear somewhat isolated, are
| not related to previous research, or claims being made in social
| media posts and websites. As such, they may be the result of
| multiple analyses.
|
| I know there's a body of work on "False Discovery Rate", and I
| think it would be more appropriate to use some of those tools to
| directly adjust for the number of attempts they're giving
| themselves.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Correct, FDR control procedures have been part of the
| statistics literature for at least 50 years, and are relatively
| easy to implement by hand. There's no excuse.
| aqueueaqueue wrote:
| Is this the green jelly beans xkcd?
| calibas wrote:
| I see these on Facebook and have avoided them. Isn't the whole
| point of the "tests" to collect personal data?
|
| I don't know if it's "a new type of psychological myth" so much
| as a scam.
| glenstein wrote:
| I wouldn't doubt that the possibility is there using it that
| way. But it just seems really impractical and inefficient. I
| think serious efforts at collecting personal data, involving
| databases and scripting to scrape data from websites that would
| not otherwise want to freely give it up, compromising passwords
| and so on. I don't know what actionable data you get from
| learning that someone judges a particular ink blot to look like
| a butterfly.
|
| I think the explanation for their prevalence is just that they
| found their place in the regular churn of memes, jokes, and
| quizzes on social media.
| calibas wrote:
| I don't believe it has anything to do with the results of the
| test, they probably just toss that out. It's that you grant
| these companies partial access to your Facebook account when
| you take these quizzes.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/quiz-what-do-
| fac...
| munchler wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines applies: Any headline that ends in
| a question mark can be answered by the word _no_. (If the answer
| was _yes_ , that would be the headline instead.)
| sdwr wrote:
| Anything can provide psychological insight! The primary action is
| the subject interpreting and responding to something. It doesn't
| matter what they are engaging with.
|
| I've been watching police interrogation videos, and it's
| staggering how many people say, unprompted, "It's not like I
| would just ___", where ___ is exactly what they did and are
| trying to hide. It's on their mind, so it comes out.
|
| Where it breaks down is when you try to "science" it, and make a
| blanket rule that applies to all people in all situations.
| hassleblad23 wrote:
| Tests to determine someone's personality are totally useless, yet
| they are everywhere. What actionable insight could you even gain.
| shw1n wrote:
| I can't speak to images
|
| But I've noticed the way people respond to ambiguous statements
| reveals a lot about their internal state
|
| (Eg do they assume you're well-intentioned, assume mal-intent,
| default to status games, etc)
|
| So I could see the image assessment working in theory if not in
| application
| adolph wrote:
| > But I've noticed the way people respond to ambiguous
| statements reveals a lot about their internal state
|
| Which then opens up more questions-is that moment in time
| quality of state something of that particular moment, or of
| that particular context, or a more stable disposition? I could
| see the image assessment working to fulfill whatever theory is
| used by the assessor, something similar to fundamental
| attribution error. The fundamental attribution
| error refers to an individual's tendency to attribute
| another's actions to their character or personality, while
| attributing their behavior to external situational factors
| outside of their control.
|
| https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...
| shw1n wrote:
| A fair point
| derbOac wrote:
| > But I've noticed the way people respond to ambiguous
| statements reveals a lot about their internal state
|
| There are well-documented cognitive biases associated with
| different forms of ambiguous stimulus interpretation.
|
| It's a target of cognitive-behavioral therapy, for instance, as
| individuals who are depressed or anxious tend to interpret
| ambiguous stimuli in certain ways (in general; every person is
| different; for example, interpreting an ambiguous social
| situation as reflecting disapproval).
|
| Aggressive individuals are more likely to exhibit a hostile
| attribution bias as well. Specifically, they're more likely to
| interpret ambiguous social situations as reflecting hostile
| intent.
|
| Even some projective tests demonstrate validity. The arguments
| in those cases tend to be about norms and how to score them and
| interpret them (to your point, I think there's some evidence
| that a Sentence Completion Test has a bit more validity than
| some others).
|
| This was kind of an interesting paper but a poor test of the
| projective/ambiguous stimulus interpretation hypothesis in
| general. On the other hand, I guess people are positing this
| stuff so it's important to have empirical boundaries around it.
|
| A lot of the work in this area has kind of died down due to
| controversies in the past and a stigma around psychodynamic
| theories. I've always thought it would be interesting to use
| modern LLM/DL models with ambiguous stimuli to test these
| hypotheses (and if they work out, develop prediction and
| scoring methods) in a more rigorous and thorough way. I think
| there's always been a kind of problem with past research of how
| to handle the responses, which are basically natural language
| responses, which are harder to code etc than T/F, rating scale
| etc. But if you have LLMs, seems like you can make it more
| tractable.
|
| There _is_ this theory that structured stimuli (e.g., an item
| on a typical questionnaire or test) allows you to more
| precisely target a process and act as primes for recognition.
| That is, if you want to know about X, you 're better off asking
| or probing specifically for X, and that will prime a respondent
| through recognition, which is more direct than asking
| indirectly about something which might initiate an off-target
| process involving more of a recall process, which is less
| reliable.
|
| That is definitely true, but it seems like sometimes you don't
| know what you're looking for, or there might be a kind of
| impression management problem where people are motivated to
| respond in certain ways. I don't think you can ever get around
| that completely, but getting at something in multiple ways
| often seems better than getting at it in just one way.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| He's my theory: We use backstory to resolve ambiguity.
|
| The ambiguity: "What's this a picture of?"
|
| A possible answer: "a duck"
|
| A backstory that gets us there: "The area colored white is
| background, and the area colored black is the foreground, and a
| black area with that shape of edge matches the silhouette of a
| duck."
|
| Another ambiguity: "Why is the white not foreground?"
|
| A backstory that gets us there: "Paper is white, ink is black,
| and when I want to draw, I use the ink to draw the duck on the
| paper."
|
| So can we conclude that any person who answers "duck" got there
| through this particular backstory? _Of course not!_ There are
| plenty of alternative paths to this conclusion.
|
| The _intention_ behind any ambiguous expression is lost forever.
| The choice of backstory will always be arbitrary.
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