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Approaches to the History of Psychological Testing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Michael M. Sokal
Michael M. Sokal*
Affiliation:
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
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Type
Essay Reviews
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Fall 1984 , pp. 419 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Historians of science and technology in the 1970s have been debating just how science becomes applied. An important discussion, with many implications for the history of applied psychology, including mental testing, is: Layton, Edwin T. Jr., “Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture, 12 (1971):562–580.Google Scholar

2. E.g., Gould's book won the 1981 National Book Critics Circle award for general non-fiction. See also Bernstein, Jeremy, “Who Was Christy Matthewson?” The New Yorker (12 April 1982): 144–153.Google Scholar

3. Hearnshaw, L. S., Cyril Burt, Psychologist (Ithaca, N. Y., 1979); ably reviewed by Karier, Clarence, “In Praise of Great Men,” History of Education Quarterly, 20 (1980):473–486.Google Scholar

4. E.g., Eckberg, Douglas Lee, Intelligence and Race: The Origins and Dimensions of the IQ Controversy (New York, 1979); Strenio, Andrew J. Jr., The Testing Trap (New York, 1981); Marks, Russell, “Testers, Trackers and Trustees: The Ideology of the Intelligence Testing Movement in America, 1900–1954” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1972; University Microfilms order no. 73–17, 311).Google Scholar

5. Lippmann's six-article attack, Terman's response, and additional published correspondence is most readily accessible in The IQ Controversy: Critical Readings, edited by Bloch, N. J. and Dworkin, Gerald (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

6. Terman, , Stanford Revision (Boston, 1916).Google Scholar

7. All volumes in this series have been published by Stanford University Press.Google Scholar

8. Terman, , “The Intelligence Quotient of Francis Galton in Childhood,” American Journal of Psychology, 28 (1917):209–215; Pearson, Karl, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1914).Google Scholar

9. Fancher, Raymond E., “Biographical Sources of Francis Galton's Psychology,” Isis, 74 (1983):227–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Terman, , “Trails to Psychology,” A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 2, edited by Murchison, Carl A. (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1932), pp. 297–332.Google Scholar

11. Sokal, Michael M. and Rafail, Patrice A., A Guide to Manuscript Collections in the History of Psychology and Related Areas (Millwood, New York, 1982), indexes eight collections that include substantial amounts of Terman material.Google Scholar

12. See, e.g., Pastore, Nicholas, “The Army Intelligence Tests and Walter Lippmann,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 14 (1978):316–327.Google Scholar

13. E.g., Skeels, Harold M., et al., A Study of Environmental Stimulation, University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare, vol. 15, no. 4 (Iowa City, Iowa, 1938).Google Scholar

14. Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972).Google Scholar

15. Gould, , “Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity,” Science, 200 (5 May 1978):503–509; Westfall, Richard S., “Newton and the Fudge Factor,” Science, 179 (23 February 1973):751–758.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

16. For fuller discussions of this point see Strenio, , The Testing Trap; the Marxist-influenced analysis of Brian Evans and Bernard Waites, IQ and Mental Testing: An Unnatural Science and Its Social History (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1981); and various specific examples, such as Gonzalez, Gilbert S., “Racism, Education, and the Mexican Community in Los Angeles, 1920–30,” Societas: A Review of Social History, 8 (1974):287–301.Google Scholar

17. E.g., Goddard, , The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York, 1912).Google Scholar

18. Haller, Mark H., Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1963).Google Scholar

19. Kamin, Leon J., The Science and Politics of IQ (Potomac, Maryland, 1974).Google Scholar

20. Samelson, Franz, “On the Science and Politics of the I.Q.,” Social Research, 42 (1975):467–488.Google Scholar

21. Sokal, and Rafail, , Guide, p. 212.Google Scholar

22. South, Earl B., Index of Periodical Literature (New York, 1937). See also Doherty, Margaret and MacLatchy, Josephine, Bibliography of Educational and Psychological Tests and Measurements, Bureau of Education, Bulletin, no. 55, 1923; Gertrude, H. Hildreth, A Bibliography of Mental Tests and Rating Scales (New York, 1933).Google Scholar

23. Buros, Oscar K., editor, The Nineteen-Thirty-Eight Mental Measurements Yearbook (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1938). The most recent edition of this guide, The Eighth Mental Measurements Yearbook, 2 vols. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1978) lists and reviews a similar number of tests that appeared between 1971 and 1977.Google Scholar

24. E.g., see Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967); Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977); Noble, David F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

25. Bledstein, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); Watson, John B., “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review, 20 (1913): 158–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. This point is probably discussed in Pozovich, Gregory J., “Functional Psychology and Its Influence on the Emergence of the Mental Testing Movement, 1870–1915” (Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1978; University Microfilms order no. 78–17, 541), which I have not seen.Google Scholar

27. Parts of these developments and their influence on psychological testing are sketched in Sokal, , “James McKeen Cattell and American Psychology in the 1920s,” Explorations in the History of Psychology in the United States, edited by Brozek, Josef (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1984), pp. 273–323. I expect that they are discussed in Chapman, Paul D., “School as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1979; University Microfilms order no. 80–11, 615), which I have not seen.Google Scholar

28. E.g., see Cremin, Lawrence A., The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York, 1961); Callahan, Raymond E., Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago, 1962); Mattingly, Paul H., The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975); Tyack, David and Hansot, Elizabeth, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

29. Cravens, Hamilton, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. These examples are discussed in detail in Fancher, Raymond E., The Intelligence Men (forthcoming), which promises to be the best book on the history of psychological testing yet published. A reading of its typescript helped clarify many of the points discussed here.Google Scholar

31. Smith, James V. and Hamilton, David, editors, The Meritocratic Intellect: Studies in the History of Educational Research (Aberdeen, Scotland, 1980).Google Scholar

32. Camfield, Thomas M., “Psychologists at War: The History of American Psychology and the First World War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1969; University Microfilms order no. 70–10, 766); Kevles, Daniel J., “Testing the Army's Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I,” Journal of American History, 55 (1968):565–581.Google Scholar

33. E.g., Flynn, James R., Race, IQ and Jensen (Boston, 1980); Joseph, Andre, Intelligence, IQ, and Race: When, How, and Why They Became Associated (San Francisco, 1977), which I have not seen.Google Scholar

34. E.g., Strenio, , The Testing Trap; Allan Nairn and Associates, The Reign of ETS: The Corporation that Makes Up Minds, The Ralph Nader Report on the Educational Testing Service (Washington, 1980).Google Scholar

35. See, however, Dubois, Philip H., A History of Psychological Testing (Boston, 1970), which presents one psychologist's very brief descriptions of many of these tests, totally out of their context, and without any attempt to explain how any was developed and used.Google Scholar

36. But see Sokal, , editor, An Education in Psychology: James McKeen Cattell's Journal and Letters from Germany and England, 1880–1888 (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

37. See Brooks, G. P. and Johnson, R. W., “Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy,” Psychological Reports, 46 (1980):3–20.Google Scholar

38. But how did the phrenologists come up with diagnoses that meant something to those whom they examined? To answer this question would require a detailed technical analysis of just what phrenology was and just how phrenologists worked, and would illustrate the value of some of my suggestions. But such an analysis is out of place here.Google Scholar

38. One dispassionate and highly useful review of psychological testing is Weinland, Thomas P., “A History of the I.Q. in America, 1890–1941” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1970; University Microfilms order no. 73–8991).Google Scholar