Barry Beyerstein & Dale Beyerstein (1992)

Summary of work in progress - Olivia Graham

The stated intention of The Write Stuff, edited by Barry and Dale Beyerstein (1992) is: “to present to the open-minded reader an overview of the best evidence available on both sides of the dispute about graphology” (p. 18). The book consists of articles, reviews and studies by a number of authors from different backgrounds, including graphologists and psychologists. The chapters, each written by a different author, are introduced by the editors.

The editors' tone is one of contempt for graphology. Rather than state arguments factually, they resort to using emotive language in an insidious attempt to sway the reader. At every possible opportunity, graphology is equated with magic, divining, fortune-telling, astrology - anything in fact that connects it with mystical and occult practises. Such obvious lack of impartiality makes it unlikely that anyone with a scientific frame of mind could consider the contents seriously. But where an open-minded reader may unwittingly be misled is where assumptions are accentuated at the expense of facts, or when the facts are correct, but slanted in a manner to convey a wholly misleading impression.

The critique is unfinished, but it is clear that some authors have a fundamental misunderstanding of graphological principles, making errors of fact, and unsubstantiated allegations in the belief that their assertions are already proven facts. My approach has been to deal with the chapters individually, in varying amounts of depth according to the merit they deserve. Authors with a scientific approach to investigating graphology are given serious consideration, whereas writers merely repeating what others have said, or relying on emotive language to augment their argument, are dealt with but briefly.

The focus of much on-going work relates to Geoffrey Dean's paper The Bottom Line: Effect Size , which includes a meta-analysis (where the results from a number of studies are combined) of personnel selection research. Dean alludes to numerous studies, and by comparing his findings with primary sources, it is possible not only to verify accuracy, but also to discover whether the methodologies used were appropriate for a graphological study. Once having distinguished between studies using researchers in place of graphologists, and those with appropriate methodologies, the objective is to re-evaluate the results from sound studies.

Part of this task involves summarising and commenting upon all studies in the English language contained in his meta-analysis, and others with contradictory results. By taking a fresh look at the primary sources, it should avoid repeating others' errors when reporting methodologies, results and conclusions – an all too common occurrence in The Write Stuff. Contributions from anyone with knowledge of particular studies are welcomed. Attached is an example summary, and suggestions as to how to improve it as a user-friendly reference would be much appreciated.

The Write Stuff is divided into six sections with authors' contributions falling under the following headings:

The introductory chapter by the Beyerstein brothers tells how and why they became involved in graphology, and their reasons for writing the book. Both admit to strong scepticism at the outset, based on “graphology‘s violation of well supported principles within areas of the editors' own professional expertise.” (p. 21) Matley (1995) summarises this chapter most aptly, as being composed “mostly of anecdote, personal viewpoint and sarcasm” (p. 11).

We find from notes at the back of the book that Barry Beyerstein is a psychophysiologist, a consultant to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal Executive Council, and chair of the Society of British Columbia Skeptics. Dale Beyerstein teaches philosophy at a community college, and sits on the boards of the Society of British Columbia Skeptics, and The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA).

The brothers' backgrounds give us an indication of the likely tone of the book. Contradictions, and half truths, are evident from the start. To illustrate, the reader is informed that whereas all the leading critics of graphology “graciously agreed to write original essays for this volume. . . . . we could not get from graphologists original essays defending graphology. So, we did the next best things: we went to the published literature” (p. 19). That much is true. One of Lockowandt's contributions was first published more than thirty years earlier in 1961, and his second contribution was a 1987 conference paper. But on the following page, the editors “are pleased that one of Europe's most prominent graphologists, Oskar Lockowandt, responded to our request to summarize the scientific support for graphology as he sees it” (p. 20), giving a totally erroneous impression that his contribution was written especially for the book.

Misleading the reader is unfortunately something we come across throughout the book, and is particularly evident in a number of misquotations. Words within inverted commas should exactly replicate the source material, with the original source page number given for easy reference, but the Beyersteins do not abide by standard rules. One of their chapter introductions has a minimum of three misquotations, possibly more, but with no reference page numbers given, it is a time-consuming task to track down the original author's words.

The biggest problem with the book is that some authors have a fundamental misunderstanding of graphological principles. For example the editors use the following as an argument against graphology:

“the physical substrate of each personality trait must unerringly connect with the same set of writing features in every writer of the Roman alphabet and a quite different set in every writer of an idiographic script such as Chinese. It strains credulity even further to think that not only would personality mechanisms have to modify hundreds of features of copybook letters in exactly the right pattern to reflect the individuality of every person who learns one system of written symbols, but must also be able to automatically lock their influences onto a totally different set if he or she should learn another arbitrary system for encoding language” (pp 30-31)

Such absurdity is hard to combat, but is met throughout the book. To give another example, Dale Beyerstein maintains that a theory of graphology must claim that individual features of handwriting correlate with specific personality traits. This quotation also indicates his belief that trained graphologists are redundant, and anyone can analyse handwriting.

“For example, the hypothesis might be, “Handwriting which slants to the right at least X o is correlated with Personality Trait T . . . . Note that the claim that there are such correlations is central to graphological theory. Once it is agreed how to measure the handwriting traits, non graphologists could measure them just as well as graphologists. For example, it would not take a graphological theoretician to discern that the width of the margin at a certain point on the page was 1.66 centimeters . Thus an experiment of this sort provides the strongest evidence for graphology, since there will no question whether the prediction is true or not. (p. 134-5)

Such a reductionist approach to graphology leads to attempts to disprove things never claimed true in the first place.

Unfortunately, few graphologists have a scientific background, enabling them to design rigorous experiments, and most scientists have insufficient knowledge of graphology to design a fair experiment. Therefore scientists and graphologists need to work together in a spirit of co-operation, developing methods that allow for both graphological and scientific integrity.