Understanding Complexity as a Construct and as a Formally Scored Variable

Abstract: This article serves three goals. First, I review complexity in Rorschach responding. As a construct, complexity illuminates ways people differentially register experiences, which produces distinct patterns of expressed behavior when completing the task. Rorschach first described this dimension, creating novel terminology for it, and it was central to Rapaport, Gill, and Schafer’s system and Schachtel’s classic text. As a scored variable, Viglione and Meyer defined it when they were brought together by Exner to work on advancing the Comprehensive System (CS) through his Rorschach Research Council; later it was adopted in the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS). Second, I review early factor analytic research identifying complexity and provide new data to document how Complexity as a scored variable is an excellent index of the first unrotated principal component when factoring individually assigned Rorschach scores. Third, I document a number of assertions published about Complexity by Fontan and Andronikof that are incorrect and misleading. I correct those assertions by means of explanation and also statistical results from two data sets. I close by offering 10 basic conclusions about complexity.