Statistics are like bikinis, what they reveal is reveal, what they hide is vital. Psychology, body language, tone of voice and handwriting are different - they reveal more than what is vital. At-least the first three of them.
I don't have a definite yes/no answer to the fourth one - handwriting. But what we can attempt to do is explore if we can find psychology based or common-sense based explanation to handwriting. I haven't met enough people who have without bias told me that graphology works. So, let's just focus on the process and forget the actual answer. Let's treat handwriting as a person because we'd like to understand it. Now every person has a very basic psychological need - to be understood. That's what we'll try to do.
Let's get into the bare basics of why graphologists claim it's accurate. They say, they have collected numerous writing samples from different personalities over the years, and then observed commonalities between similar personalities and their handwriting. In other words, they have statistical data of mapping of general handwriting traits of people to their personalities. We can look at this in very similar manner as we look at the way psychiatrists work. They have a mapping between similar traits and similar responses to a particular stimuli.
In fields like psychology, there is a large enough sample with proven results, therefore considered as science. May be if graphologists get paid more, there may be enough data to prove or disprove handwriting analysis as well. There you go - statistics poking it's nose again! and there are exceptions just like in everything. Once we go through a few technical details of graphology, may be we can have an answer for ourselves - our own answer!
I don't have a definite yes/no answer to the fourth one - handwriting. But what we can attempt to do is explore if we can find psychology based or common-sense based explanation to handwriting. I haven't met enough people who have without bias told me that graphology works. So, let's just focus on the process and forget the actual answer. Let's treat handwriting as a person because we'd like to understand it. Now every person has a very basic psychological need - to be understood. That's what we'll try to do.
Let's get into the bare basics of why graphologists claim it's accurate. They say, they have collected numerous writing samples from different personalities over the years, and then observed commonalities between similar personalities and their handwriting. In other words, they have statistical data of mapping of general handwriting traits of people to their personalities. We can look at this in very similar manner as we look at the way psychiatrists work. They have a mapping between similar traits and similar responses to a particular stimuli.
In fields like psychology, there is a large enough sample with proven results, therefore considered as science. May be if graphologists get paid more, there may be enough data to prove or disprove handwriting analysis as well. There you go - statistics poking it's nose again! and there are exceptions just like in everything. Once we go through a few technical details of graphology, may be we can have an answer for ourselves - our own answer!
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