S u m m a r y

Tamminen S & Lindeman M (2000)

Wartegg &endash; a valid personality test or magical thinking?

Psykologia 35(4):325-331. Vammala ISSN 0355-1067

 

The Wartegg Zeichen Test is a projective drawing test, widely used in personnel selection and in clinical work in Finland. Despite its popularity, the validity of the test has not been adequately examined. The article reports two studies in which the validity of Gardziella's scoring system for interpreting Wartegg drawings was analyzed. The results of the first study (N=107) showed that the drawing contents were not related to the criterion measures of anxiety, need for affiliation, need for achievement or attachment styles, as suggested by the Wartegg handbook. In the second study, lay persons (N=34) who were not familiar with the test interpreted the drawings correctly based on their everyday (i.e., experiential) thinking only. These results suggest that the scoring system may not be valid but rather obeys the magical law of similarity (i.e., the assumption about the similarity of the drawing content and an individual's personality).

 

 

Key words:

Wartegg, magical thinking, experiential thinking, validity.

 

Susanna Tamminena, graduate & Marjaana Lindeman, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 13, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.