Marc Wilson: From children’s drawings to inkblots, it pays not to ‘see’ too much in art

Why are they so hard? We, particularly beginners, draw what we think we know rather than what we see, and this produces a range of common errors, such as straight, parallel or sausage-like fingers that don’t bend where they’re supposed to.

Anyone who’s seen a child’s drawing of a person will recognise some of the classic errors they make. But the reasons for their errors aren’t a result of biased mismanagement of complex visual information, like adults, but reflect their stage of cognitive and motor development. Three and four-year-olds draw a “tadpole” with a large head attached to a few sticks that seem to ignore what children will admit if asked: stomachs.

It’s been argued this reflects a kind of anchoring bias – children know that the head is important for eating, speaking, listening, etc, and devote more cognitive (and page) space to that part of the body.

As children get older, bodies fill out, but we see fingers that radiate star-like from the end of the arms, and arms that regularly stick out perpendicular to the body, reflecting a strong bias that children’s drawings have towards 90° angles. Heads and hands are often disproportionately large because of their social and functional importance.

As it happens, this year is the 100th anniversary of the Draw-a-Person test. Since 1926, psychologists and researchers have been getting kids to draw people, then analysing the drawings to evaluate the child’s cognitive maturity and intelligence. The problem? It’s not very good for this. There’s such variation within developmental stages that – though there’s a weak relationship between general intelligence and the complexity and comprehensiveness of a drawn person –the test is best used as an indicator of pronounced developmental delay.

What about how people interpret pictures? I’m teaching personality right now, and that means starting with the grandaddy of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. Usually, you’ll learn more about him in literary studies than psychology courses, but I think it’s useful to learn how Freud’s ideas were important – because they were often wrong.

I’ve written previously about Hermann Rorschach, whose inkblots have become famous as “projective tests” of what’s buried deep in one’s subconscious. Apart from bearing a resemblance to Brad Pitt, Rorschach died relatively young. But his legacy, his inkblots, are nowhere near as good a window to the buried depths of our psyche as followers of Freud would have hoped.

They’re not the only projective tests around, though. I routinely ask students to look at a line drawing of a man leaning at a desk and looking thoughtful, and ask them to make up a story of what he’s doing or thinking. If they say something like “he’s writing a love letter to his wife” this is supposed to indicate the student has a motivation to seek intimacy, affiliation or social connections with others. If they say he’s putting the finishing touches to the screenplay that’s going to win him an Oscar, that’s an indication of achievement motivation, whereas if he’s signing off on promotions (or firings) this might signal a power motivation.

In the 1960s, Harvard psychologist David McLelland followed students and young professionals over more than a decade to see if their responses to this Thematic Apperception Test predicted their futures. He found people who demonstrated strong need for achievement at first testing were significantly more likely to have moved into successful entrepreneurial occupations.