About the Institute

History, mission, and governance since 1967

Founding & Mission

The Institute for Projective Sciences was founded in 1967 in Zürich, Switzerland, as a charitable trust under Swiss law. The founding charter, signed by Prof. Alistair W. Croft of the University of St Andrews and six inaugural trustees, established the Institute with a specific mandate: to develop rigorous, reproducible methods for interpreting individual responses to ambiguous visual stimuli, and to ensure that those methods withstand scrutiny across populations, cultures, and generations.

The Institute was conceived during a period of intense debate within perceptual psychology regarding the standardisation and validation of projective assessment instruments. Prof. Croft, whose early work at St Andrews had demonstrated systematic patterns in how subjects classified ambiguous images, argued that projective assessment required the same methodological rigour as any other scientific discipline. The Institute was the institutional expression of that conviction.

Over five decades, the Institute has assembled the world’s most comprehensive collection of standardised projective instruments, conducted longitudinal validation studies across 34 countries, established archival standards for the preservation and digitisation of assessment materials, convened leading researchers through its biennial symposia, and maintained ethical oversight of assessment methodology research. Its Archive of Perceptual Response Data, containing more than 4.7 million individual response protocols, represents the complete record of the Institute’s active research programme from 1967 to 2012.