Sleight of handwriting

The following sentences appeared in the paper on Sunday:

Handwriting analysis, called graphology, is a scientific method of interpreting personality through script.

One of the oldest psychological studies, handwriting analysis can reveal more than 300 character traits, including thinking patterns, achievement traits, communications skills, levels of stress, possible addictions, certain potential physical problems, and tendencies toward secrecy, deception, self-deception and excessive fantasy.

This is, to use the technical term, a big, steaming pile.

It's even worse in the context of the rest of the article, which was given the headline "Handwriting expert: Killer's fantasy, reality were blurred."* The killer in question was Charles Carl Roberts IV, the violently disturbed dead milkman who last Monday fatally shot five pacifist schoolgirls and injured five others in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa. Roberts left a long suicide note, the content of which, like his actions, probably offers some insight into his troubled mind.

But the paper wasn't interested in the content of Roberts note. We were interested in his penmanship. So we decided to have his handwriting analyzed by a purported "expert" in the "science" of graphology.

I guess Miss Ivannah, the three-nippled carny soothsayer from Mallrats wasn't available, so we had to go with the next best thing.

Journalistically, this is depressing at so many levels. Several editors, people at pay-grades significantly higher than my own, decided this article was a good idea: that the pseudo-scientific scam of "graphology" was worth the ink and real estate of 16 inches in our incredible shrinking news-hole. They apparently didn't worry that this demonstrated a callous contempt for the truth, for our readers, or for the grief-stricken communities of Lancaster County.

So they sent a young reporter to interview the president of a "consulting group" that provides graphological services for corporate America, and the young reporter dutifully transcribed — without question, without qualification, without a hint of the skepticism that journalism entails — this self-proclaimed expert's "analysis" as well as her unsupported and unsupportable assertions about the scientific legitimacy of her claims. This uncritical stenography produced a dubious litany of pseudoscientific babble, which was in turn signed off on by two more layers of editors and published in the paper as though it were actual journalism.

The graphologist concluded that Roberts' handwriting revealed "signs of aggressiveness," deception and violence. And she figured all that out, she says, from his handwriting, through objective "analysis" uninfluenced by the fact that she was reading a letter left by a violently disturbed killer and suicide whose own actual words characterized himself in exactly those terms. Even if "graphology" were not a sideshow parlor trick, it would be hard to see any news value in that. When a killer writes, "I am filled with so much hate," and then goes out and kills a bunch of kids and himself, do we really need the "expert analysis" of a flim-flam artist to tell us that he wrote the word "hate" with "Strong upstrokes on the letter 't' show[ing] signs of aggressiveness"?

And even if there were a shred of value in that, is it ever appropriate for an alleged news article to include the two paragraphs quoted above — apparently dictated and duly transcribed directly from the sales brochure of the "Consulting Group," but presented as though these promotional claims were objective truths?

All you need to know about the business model of that consulting group is contained there in that second paragraph. Look at the consultants claims for the insights she can divine from the tea leaves of penmanship: "achievement traits … possible addictions, certain potential physical problems, and tendencies toward deception." Her racket is to offer her services to corporate employers, for a fee, of course, as a way of spotting potential troublemakers in the ranks. And corporations, still stinging from the fact that they're legally prohibited from subjecting all of their employees to other forms of pseudoscientific analysis, such as random polygraph tests, are apparently willing to pay for this.

Here, then, is a suggestion for the follow-up article the paper needs to publish in order to atone for the sins against journalism and the insult to their readers: How about an investigation into the way that corporations are using the dubious claims of "graphologists"? Does this mean that, if they want you out, or if they want a pretext for denying annual pay raises, they can simply pay some consultant to provide pseudoscientific cover by saying it's because of the "many approach strokes" in your penmanship, which purportedly reveal duplicity and a lack of decisiveness? Such an article ought to mention, among other things, that the claims of graphologists are not admissible in court because the courts do not recognize any scientific validity to handwriting analysis as a means of personality assessment. It ought also to mention potential legal protections for employees from such flim-flammery — something like the model anti-graphology statute proposed here.

I'm waiting for this follow up article. But I'm not holding my breath.

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* No link here, because A) such a link might increase the potential for this post resulting in my getting dooced; and B) the online version of the article is substantially different from the print version, with some additional qualifications and context; and C) I don't want to pile on the young reporter, who dutifully followed the instructions she was given for this assignment, but it's her name in the byline and not those of the many editors who utterly failed her.