Is it possible for handwriting to infer a person's character?

From a person's handwriting, we can infer his personality characteristics, which has a very long history. Yang Xiong, a writer of Han Dynasty in China, once said: "Words are also, and hearts are also; Books, heart paintings. People think that a person's handwriting can reflect his moral quality.

In the west, the technique of inferring character through handwriting is called graphology, which can be traced back to Aristotle. After years of development, handwriting analysis has formed a complete industry in the west. Not only are there many specialized handwriting analysis companies and training courses, but some enterprises even apply them to personnel selection [3]. In recent years, some so-called "handwriting psychology" has also appeared in China. It is said that the accuracy of handwriting analysis is extremely high, which can not only evaluate your personality, but also help you find the right person and provide reference for various important life decisions.

On the basis of speculation, graphology is similar to horoscope and blood type in form, and both of them try to infer the inner character that is difficult to grasp through some directly visible and easily distinguished indicators. If such a forecasting system is effective, the premise is that there is indeed a powerful mechanism that can link personality with indicators. No matter constellation, blood type or graphology, there is no convincing explanation for the mechanism behind it. Writing is an acquired skill, which involves complex and delicate movements of hand muscles and is regulated by the nervous system. Personality can also be attributed to the activity pattern of the nervous system to a certain extent. In this sense, there may be a certain degree of correlation between the two.

But this relationship is too vague, and there are many other factors that will affect a person's personality or writing style. Such a subtle relationship alone is not enough to support a practical forecasting system. Judging from various handwriting analysis systems, many analysis rules are actually based on a simple association.

For example, the fluency of handwriting represents the fluency of character, and the decisiveness of strokes represents the decisiveness of character. This semantic connection is more like a metaphor, and it is hard to imagine any realistic basis.

Although graphology has no scientific basis, as a personality prediction system, its effectiveness can still be evaluated by scientific methods. In the history of psychology, many researchers are interested in this issue, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when many confirmatory studies appeared. The common research method is to find some subjects to provide words and complete the personality test, and then hand over the written materials to the handwriting analyst for personality analysis, and then compare them with the results of the subjects' own personality test.

In order to control the influence of writing content, subjects are generally required to write neutral content (such as explanatory text). Unfortunately, in these strictly controlled tests, handwriting analysts' predictions are generally not much better than pure guesses. 1992, psychologist Geoffrey A. Dean made a meta-analysis of more than 200 studies on handwriting and personality, and found that the correlation coefficient between handwriting analysis and personality was only 0. 12, which means that the proportion of graphology accurately predicting personality was less than 2%.

Such a weak effect has no practical value. In addition, the consistency rate among different analysts is low, the correlation coefficient is only 0.42, and the consistency rate of non-professionals can reach 0.3, which shows that handwriting analysis lacks a set of molding standards, which further limits its effectiveness. The British Psychological Society also believes that graphology has zero effect in personnel selection and is tied to the constellation.