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Another frequently administered projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT),
developed by the psychologist Henry Murray (1893–1988).
TheThematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective measure of personality in which the
respondent is asked to create stories about sketches of ambiguous situations, most of them of
people, either alone or with others(Figure 11.6 "Sample Card From the TAT"). The sketches are
shown to individuals, who are asked to tell a story about what is happening in the picture. The
TAT assumes that people may be unwilling or unable to admit their true feelings when asked
directly but that these feelings will show up in the stories about the pictures. Trained coders read
the stories and use them to develop a personality profile of the respondent.
Other popular projective tests include those that ask the respondent to draw pictures, such as the
Draw-A-Person test (Machover, 1949), [30] and free association tests in which the respondent
quickly responds with the first word that comes to mind when the examiner says a test word.
Another approach is the use of “anatomically correct” dolls that feature representations of the
male and female genitals. Investigators allow children to play with the dolls and then try to
determine on the basis of the play if the children may have been sexually abused.
The advantage of projective tests is that they are less direct, allowing people to avoid using their
defense mechanisms and therefore show their “true” personality. The idea is that when people
view ambiguous stimuli they will describe them according to the aspects of personality that are
most important to them, and therefore bypass some of the limitations of more conscious
responding.
Despite their widespread use, however, the empirical evidence supporting the use of projective
tests is mixed (Karon, 2000; Wood, Nezworski, Lilienfeld, & Garb, 2003). [31] The reliability of
the measures is low because people often produce very different responses on different
occasions. The construct validity of the measures is also suspect because there are very few
consistent associations between Rorschach scores or TAT scores and most personality traits. The
projective tests often fail to distinguish between people with psychological disorders and those
without or to correlate with other measures of personality or with behavior.