Ted talks

On 13th September 2016, Dr Noriko Nakamura, President of the International Rorschach Society, alerted us to a Ted talk given by Dr Ben Ambridge in which he discusses the Rorschach.  His talk was about debunking certain myths in psychology.  He displayed two of the ink blots and invited the audience to vote on what they saw and then said that the test has “no validity” and that “modern psychologists do not use it.”


Since Dr Ambridge is at University of Liverpool in the UK, we approached him to discuss this issue.  He advised us that he based his critical stance towards the test on: Lilienfeld, S. O., Wood, J. M., & Garb, H. N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques. Psychological science in the public interest, 1(2), 27-66.


However, he was open to receiving more up to date literature and we are happy to report that upon reviewing this literature, he agreed that “some scales have good validity for some purposes.”  We have also heard from Ted Talks that they will be issuing a retraction and we await confirmation of this.