Hill had learned a rule of thumb in grad school that she had repeatedly seen confirmed in practice: a troubled personality can often keep it together on an IQ test and an MMPI, do pretty well on a TAT, then fall apart when faced with the inkblots. Victor Norris couldn’t even manage what he wanted to say about what he’d seen. You can manage what you want to say but you can’t manage what you want to see. Crucially, it’s a visual task, so it gets around your defenses and conscious strategies of self-presentation. It’s a strange and open-ended task, where it is not at all clear what the inkblots are supposed to be or how you’re expected to respond to them. Even more revealing than the specific things he had seen in the inkblots was the fact that he had felt free to say them. On the Rorschach, his persona broke down. He knew how he wanted to come across in interviews and what kind of bland answers to give on the other tests. He was perfectly aware that he was undergoing an evaluation, for a job he wanted. If nothing else, the Rorschach test had prompted Norris to show a side of himself he didn’t otherwise let show. As Hill expected, her calculations showed Norris’s scores to be as extreme as his answers. She then calculated the formulas that would turn all those scores into psychological judgments: dominant personality style, Egocentricity Index, Flexibility of Thinking Index, the Suicide Constellation. She systematically assigned Norris’s responses the various codes of the standard method and categorized his answers as typical or unusual using the long lists in the manual. Hill politely sent him on his way-he left her office with a firm handshake and a smile, looking her straight in the eye-then she turned to the legal pad facedown on her desk, with the record of his responses. Norris’s answers were shocking: elaborate, violent sexual scenes with children parts of the inkblots seen as female being punished or destroyed. The stories were pleasant, with no inappropriate ideas, and he had no anxiety or other signs of discomfort in the telling. When Hill showed him a series of pictures with no captions and asked him to tell her a story about what was happening in each one-another standard assessment called the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT-Norris gave answers that were a bit obvious, but harmless enough. On the most common personality test in America, a series of 567 yes-or-no questions called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, he was cooperative and in good spirits. His scores were normal to high on the cognitive tests she gave him, including an IQ well above average. Norris had seemed an ideal candidate in interviews, charming and friendly with a suitable résumé and unimpeachable references. Over two long November afternoons, he spent eight hours at the office of Caroline Hill, an assessment psychologist working in Chicago. Victor Norris had reached the final round of applying for a job working with young children, but, this being America at the turn of the 21st century, he still had to undergo a psychological evaluation.
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