How conditioning by one’s job leads to visual misrepresentation: Evidence from Rorschach test in nurse population

Exner (1974, 2003, 2005) has developed an empirical method for analyzing answers at Rorschach test. This analysis is not focused on the answer content but more on perception, information processing and quality of the answer. Thus, contrary to psychoanalysis, the content and its interpretation are not systematically studied in this empirical approach. In this perspective, our purpose was to empirically study how answers and performance at Rorschach test were conditioning by one’s job. We administrated Rorschach test to 38 nurses and 38 paired subjects (matched for gender and age). Our data showed nurses gave significantly more anatomical answers than control subjects, this first result confirmed a clinical assumption that was never objectified by previous studies: conditioning by one’s job influences the answer content at the Rorschach test (e.g., people from medical sector tend to see organs). The second main result is the formal qualities of anatomical answers given by nurses were significantly worse and more unusual than anatomical answers given by the control group. These findings suggest that conditioning by one’s job is so strong that it overrides the other choices of answers and can lead to a deformation of the visual perception. Furthermore, the content is the main answer element subjects can control in this test and thus, it could be a means of affirming his/her identity (e.g., nurse’s identity by anatomical content). Moreover, in regard to the bad formal quality of anatomical answers, it seems that nurse’s identity takes precedence over the reality and the actual form perception.