Proponents of the technique assert that subjects' responses, in the narratives they make up about ambiguous pictures of people, reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world.
[3] She reported that when her son was ill, he spent the day making up stories about images in magazines and she asked Murray if pictures could be employed in a clinical setting to explore the underlying dynamics of personality.
Murray wanted to use a measure that would reveal information about the whole person but found the contemporary tests of his time lacking in this regard.
The rationale behind the technique is that people tend to interpret ambiguous situations in accordance with their own past experiences and current motivations, which may be conscious or unconscious.
After World War II, the TAT was adopted more broadly by psychoanalysts and clinicians to evaluate emotionally disturbed patients.
Later, in the 1970s, the Human Potential Movement encouraged psychologists to use the TAT to help their clients understand themselves better and stimulate personal growth.
[9] However, the examiner should aim to select a variety of cards in order to get a more global perspective of the storyteller and to avoid confirmation bias (i.e., finding only what you are looking for).
Many of the TAT drawings consist of sets of themes such as: success and failure, competition and jealousy, feeling about relationships, aggression, and sexuality.
Even when individual scoring procedures are examined, the absence of standardization or norms make it difficult to compare the results of validity and reliability research across studies.
Internal consistency, a reliability estimate focusing on how highly test items correlate to each other, is often quite low for TAT scoring systems.
[12] Jenkins [17] has stated that "the phrase 'validity of the TAT' is meaningless, because validity is specific not to the pictures, but to the set of scores derived from the population, purpose, and circumstances involved in any given data collection."
For example, one study indicated that clinicians classified individuals as clinical or non-clinical at close to chance levels (57% where 50% would be guessing) based on TAT data alone.
For example, it has been argued that the purpose of the TAT is to reveal a wide range of personality characteristics and complex, nuanced patterns, as opposed to traditional psychological tests that are designed to measure unitary and narrow constructs.
First, they noted that traditional views of reliability may limit the validity of a measure (such as occurs with multi-faceted concepts in which characteristics are not necessarily related to each other, but are meaningful in combination).
Murray's system involved coding every sentence given for the presence of 28 needs and 20 presses (environmental influences), which were then scored from 1 to 5, based on intensity, frequency, duration, and importance to the plot.
[21] Although not widely used in the clinical setting, several formal scoring systems have been developed for analyzing TAT stories systematically and consistently.
Individuals can select certain scoring systems if they have the goal to evaluate a specific variable such as motivation, defense mechanisms, achievement, problem-solving skills, etc.
[citation needed] The lack of standardization of the cards given and scoring systems applied is problematic because it makes comparing research on the TAT very difficult.
Some critics of the TAT cards have observed that the characters and environments are dated, even "old-fashioned", creating a "cultural or psycho-social distance" between the patients and the stimuli that makes identifying with them less likely.
Despite criticisms, the TAT continues to be used as a tool for research into areas of psychology such as dreams, fantasies, mate selection and what motivates people to choose their occupation.
It is also commonly used in routine psychological evaluations, typically without a formal scoring system, as a way to explore emotional conflicts and object relations.
[citation needed] David McClelland and Ruth Jacobs conducted a 12-year longitudinal study of leadership using TAT and found no gender differences in motivational predictors of attained management level.
For example, the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981) includes a scene where the imprisoned psychiatrist and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter mocks a previous attempt to administer the test to him.
Michael Crichton included the TAT in the battery of tests given to the disturbed main character Harry Benson in his novel The Terminal Man (1972).
The test is also given to the main characters in two widely differing tales about the human mind: A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1958–1966).