Graphology
What does it say about our society that some of our largest and most powerful firms, including financial giants such as Merrill Lynch and Prudential, have resorted to “handwriting analysis” to “weed out potentially troublesome hires1 and to monitor the behavior of existing employees”? To be honest, I’m not really sure. I do know that it if corporations were measuring skulls, or counting people’s teeth before hiring them it would say the same thing about the state of our society; but what might that be?
On the one hand it could mean that we are so inept at identifying whether someone is qualified for a job that a purely random means of identification works just as well as anything else. Or, it could mean that people doing the job hiring already know who they want to hire but they are so incapable of justifying their decisions on substantive grounds that they need to rely on this kind of nonsense to legitimate their decisions. It could be an elaborate means to justify discriminatory hiring practices. Or it could just reflect the high level of ignorance which prevails even amongst the most powerful and “well educated.” Perhaps it simply reflects the fact that America’s unprecedented high levels of “productivity” reflect unprecedented levels of exploitation. As one guy said on the NY City subway the other day, “I’m now doing the work of six people, and I’m not getting paid any more for it.”
One thing I know for sure. It is a damn good argument against running our government more like a corporation.
The article offers a brief history of handwriting analysis:
Graphology dates back to 11th-century China, said Dr. Barry Beyerstein, professor of biological psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and co-author of “The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology - The Study of Handwriting Analysis” (Prometheus Books, September 1992). An early proponent was Camillo Baldi, an Italian physician who wrote a book on the subject in 1662.
1I couldn’t generate a permalink for this NY Times article, so it will likely expire in a couple of weeks.
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Comments
I’m a little puzzled by this post. It seems to me that handwriting is a different thing entirely from skull size and the number of teeth people have… it’s a learned behavior that undoubtedly has some correlation with academic achievement. I’m not saying it isn’t a little backwards (and convoluted) to base hiring practices on handwriting analysis, but to me it doesn’t really justify this level of exhasperation. Maybe I’m missing something? I’d like to hear more…
If you want to know academic achievement look at someone’s GPA, not their handwriting. There are people who have a very high GPA and whose handwriting is lousy. But Graphology is not about how neat your handwriting is, they claim to be able to tell what kind of personality you have from your handwriting. That is pure nonsense.
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Barry’s a great professor and his research is meticulous. What does it mean? I have always leaned toward an explanation related to your last one. It used to be that advanced scientific thinking demanded a progressive world view, but now engineering is so powerful that anyone can work with it, regardless of their epistemological framework; engineers who believe in ghosts test the accuracy of machines and build computers, while some who believe the world is 6000 years do geological surveys.