The Responsibility scoring system, first used in a study by D. G. Winter and Barenbaum (1985b), consists of five categories: Moral–Legal Standard of Conduct, Internal Obligation, Concern for Others, Concern about Consequences, and Self-judgment. These categories are used to score imaginative verbal material, including both individual thematic apperceptive stories and also other verbal materials such as speeches, fiction, open-ended questions, and so forth, collectively known as “running text” (see D. G. Winter, 1991).

The scoring system can be applied in either of two ways: First, individual thematic apperceptive stories can be scored in the usual way (cf. Atkinson, 1958a). Here each story is treated as a separate unit and scored for the presence or absence of each category. A category is scored only once per story, no matter how many times it occurs in that story. Each category counts as +1, so that the total score for a story is the sum of categories scored as present in that story. A person's total score is the sum of scores on all stories. (See chapter 21 and also D. G. Winter, 1973, p. 146, for a discussion of how to handle situations where total scores are significantly correlated with the length of the thematic apperceptive stories.)