What the Wartegg Test Measures: All 8 Fields, With the Real Evidence
Eight small boxes.
Each with something already drawn inside: a dot, a line, a curve.
Your task: complete the drawing.
That’s how one of the most widely used personnel-selection tests works in several Spanish-speaking countries.
Who Wartegg was, and what he did differently
Ehrig Wartegg, a German psychologist.
1926: the first version of his technique.
1939: he publishes the definitive 8-field version.
His key difference: neither a blank page, nor a direct question.
A stimulus halfway between the two. Ambiguous, but not empty.
The hypothesis: that would lower conscious censorship, letting more spontaneous associations show through.
The 8 fields, one by one
Each field was designed to evoke a different area:
- Field 1. A central dot → the self, the starting point.
- Field 2. A wavy line → the emotional world.
- Field 3. Three ascending lines → one’s own goals.
- Field 4. A small square → control and norms.
- Field 5. Two opposing lines → how you handle conflict.
- Field 6. Two unconnected straight lines → rationality.
- Field 7. A dotted semicircle → emotional sensitivity.
- Field 8. A large arc → the bond with one’s surroundings.
Eight stimuli. Eight distinct hypotheses about what they’d reveal.
The underlying problem: two different things, often confused
There’s a distinction worth making explicit here.
Reliability: whether two raters score the same drawing similarly.
Validity: whether that score predicts anything real about the person.
These are different things. A test can have high reliability and low validity at the same time.
The 2012 meta-analysis: every study, together
Jarna Soilevuo Grønnerød and Cato Grønnerød.
They pooled every available study on the Wartegg.
Published in Psychological Assessment, a leading journal in psychological assessment.
Their two central numbers:
- Inter-rater reliability: 0.74 on average. Reasonably high.
- Validity, in the studies with clear hypotheses: 0.33. Much more modest.
An honest reading: the test is scored consistently. What that score says about the actual person is an entirely different matter.
The study’s most uncomfortable conclusion
The authors themselves point out something telling.
Despite those reasonable numbers, research on the Wartegg hasn’t managed to build accumulated knowledge.
Why?
Research traditions stayed isolated by country and language for decades.
Germany, Italy, Latin America: lines of study that barely spoke to one another.
The result: decades of clinical use, with no unified body of evidence behind it.
The 2007 study: comparing the Wartegg with other instruments
Souza, Primi, and Miguel, 2007.
They compared the Wartegg with two other instruments: the 16PF and the BPR-5.
And with something very concrete: the real job performance of 121 people.
The result: few significant correlations.
Some matched what the classic interpretation predicts.
Others ran in the opposite direction.
A pattern you’ve likely seen in other articles on this site: when tested against data, the classic symbolic interpretation rarely comes out unscathed.
Why it’s still used in hiring
A fair question: if validity is this modest, why does it remain so popular in selection processes?
Part of the answer lies in reliability itself.
A test that scores consistently looks objective, even though that consistency doesn’t guarantee it predicts anything real.
It’s easy to mistake “it always scores the same way” for “it measures something true.”
What 0.33 means in practice
It’s worth translating that number into something more concrete.
An effect of 0.33 isn’t zero. It isn’t a strong relationship either.
In terms of variance explained, it works out to roughly 11%.
In other words: knowing someone’s Wartegg result, you could explain, roughly, one-tenth of what varies in the trait it’s supposed to measure.
The other 89% depends on everything else.
Enough to justify some curiosity. Not enough to base important decisions on alone, like hiring or rejecting someone for a job.
What to do with a result like this
Neither dismiss the test entirely, nor treat it as an oracle.
The most honest stance, the same one the rest of this site takes: use it for what it is.
A curious exercise in how you complete ambiguous stimuli today, at this specific moment.
Not a fixed snapshot of who you are.
Why these 8 stimuli, specifically
Wartegg didn’t pick the shapes at random.
Each one combines two ingredients: a geometric quality (straight or curved, closed or open) and a position within the box.
Straight lines (fields 3, 4, 5, and 6) tend to produce more structured content: objects, constructions, recognizable shapes.
Curves (fields 2, 7, and 8) tend to produce more organic content: living creatures, landscapes, flowing shapes.
Field 1, the dot, is the exception: neither straight nor curved, the most minimal stimulus possible.
This design logic (straight = artificial, curved = organic) is itself one more Wartegg hypothesis, not a fact verified separately from the rest of the system.
How our test works
Here we do something different from the other drawing tests on this site, and we want to be clear about why.
We present the 8 fields, each with its real stimulus already drawn in.
But we don’t interpret what you draw over it.
Why? Because doing it properly requires recognizing content (a boat, a face, a landscape) and judging its formal quality. That takes the trained judgment of a professional looking at the actual drawing.
Pretending a simple algorithm could do that would be exactly the kind of overclaim this site avoids in every one of its tests.
Instead, the report shows you what each field is meant to assess according to the original method, along with the two real numbers from the 2012 meta-analysis, so you can decide for yourself how much weight to give it.
If you’re interested in this same contrast (what the classic method claimed versus what the evidence says today) applied to another drawing test, Koch’s Tree Drawing Test follows the exact same format.
If you want to complete the 8 stimuli yourself, you can take the Wartegg Test.
Sources
- Grønnerød, J. S., & Grønnerød, C. (2012). The Wartegg Zeichen Test: A literature overview and a meta-analysis of reliability and validity. Psychological Assessment, 24(2), 476-489.
- Souza, C. V. R., Primi, R., & Miguel, F. K. (2007). Validade do Teste Wartegg: correlação com 16PF, BPR-5 e desempenho profissional. Avaliação Psicológica, 6, 39-49.
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Frequently asked questions
Who was Ehrig Wartegg?
A German psychologist who created his technique in 1926 and published it in the form known today, with 8 stimulus fields, in 1939. It's known as the Wartegg Zeichentest (WZT), or the 8-field test.
Is the Wartegg test reliable?
It depends on what you mean by reliable. A 2012 meta-analysis pooling all available studies found that different raters score the same drawing reasonably similarly (reliability averaging 0.74), but that the test's ability to predict real personality traits is much more modest (0.33 in the best-designed studies).
Is this test used in hiring processes?
Yes, it's one of its most frequent uses in several countries, especially across Latin America. A 2007 study comparing it with other instruments and with real job performance found few significant correlations.
Why doesn't our online test interpret what you drew?
Because a real Wartegg interpretation requires recognizing what you drew over each stimulus (an object, a scene, something abstract), a trained expert judgment call that can't honestly be automated. Instead of inventing an interpretation, we show what each field is meant to assess according to the original method.
