Contingent differences: An historical note on Evelyn Hooker’s uses of significance testing

Abstract

Evelyn Hooker’s Rorschach experiments are frequently remembered as an early use of the scientific method to gay-affirmative ends in psychology. Hooker determined that the Rorschach responses of gay and straight men were indistinguishable, and hence that the two groups were equivalently ‘well-adjusted’ in psychological terms. Yet Hooker’s conclusions were contingent upon particular methods of significance testing. Hooker’s rationale for the use of unmatched significance tests (which led her to conclude the two groups were similar) shows how her work was embedded within a context where psychological differences between lesbian/gay and straight persons were almost universally taken as evidence of lesbian/gay persons’ psychopathology. Hooker’s discussions of differences among gay men shows some problematic elements of ‘liberal humanist’ thinking. Hooker’s work ought to be favorably remembered more for the challenges that it presented to practices of diagnosing and detecting gay men, than for the particular psychological theory of male homosexuality that she voiced.